Florida Water Resources Monitoring Council Announces Release of the Water-CAT

TALLAHASSEE – The Florida Water Resources Monitoring Council has released the “Water-CAT,” an interactive, searchable, web-enabled catalog of Florida-based monitoring efforts which was developed under contract by the University of South Florida’s Center for Community Design and Research. The catalog was developed for resource managers, agencies, universities, policymakers, and members of the public to facilitate access to information on marine, freshwater, groundwater, sediment and biological monitoring within the state. The Water-CAT will expedite data sharing, increase the availability of information, improve resource management, and minimize duplicative monitoring efforts.

“The Water-CAT will be an invaluable resource for DEP and partner agencies,” said Tom Frick, director of the Division of Environmental Assessment and Restoration. “We are enthusiastic about employing tools like the Water-CAT that can help us coordinate and achieve water restoration more quickly and with more information.”

The Water-CAT allows both basic and advanced searches by organization, monitoring project, station location, monitoring frequency, time range, sampled parameters and other pertinent data. Searches are designed to be downloadable and can be exported to an Excel spreadsheet, or into a KML file to display information as geographic points on Google Earth. Currently the Water-CAT contains monitoring data from approximately 74 organizations and nearly 105,000 monitoring stations across the state. The Water-CAT will continue to add new organizations, monitoring stations and other data, as well as links to the data source moving forward.

The Florida Water Resources Monitoring Council, chaired by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, is a coordinating body of 21 stakeholders that participate in water resource monitoring and management. The Council is charged with informing, planning and coordinating water resource monitoring efforts at the state, local, and federal levels.

The Council strives to focus on pertinent, meaningful projects and products to advance high-quality, integrated water resource monitoring in Florida.