WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE
Young researchers are using powerful GIS technology to make water management in Texas more efficient.
Written by Scott Slemmons
Texas is known as a dry place when it comes to water. Faucets or fountains, most people know that their water is not far away. A serious business in the state, water is vitally important to agriculture and industry – and, of course, to state residents. Managing this precious resource is critical for the future.
Researchers at Texas Tech University are working to make water management in Texas more efficient than ever. Texas Tech’s Department of Economics and Geography is working with the High Plains Underground Water Conservation District No. 1 — the oldest and largest ground water district in Texas — to develop a computerized database and software application to manage more than 72,000 water wells within the district’s boundaries, which cover more than 10,000 square miles in 15 counties.
According to Kevin Mulligan, Ph.D., assistant professor of geography, and Lucia Barbato, M.A., senior research associate, undergraduate students working in the Geographic Information Systems Research Lab spent the last year scanning paper maps from the water district and entering data about the water wells into a searchable computer database.
“The goal was to automate the procedures that they use to help manage and maintain their wells and the permit information,” says Barbato. “GIS is a very powerful technology because it allows us to visualize information from databases that we otherwise couldn’t see, and it allows us to integrate different layers of information. For example, we can take wells, roads, rivers, county boundaries, land-use, satellite images or any other layer of information and analyze them together.”
According to Mulligan, the GIS database will allow the water district’s record-keeping to become more efficient, accurate and flexible, permitting the district to search for information about the wells, including location, ownership, permit status and depth.
“You can perform spatial queries on the map to display wells that meet specific criteria. For example, the water district may need to locate wells in Lamb County within one mile of a specific intersection. The GIS application will search through the database, find those wells that are within a mile of the intersection, and then highlight those on the map. So the map and the database are dynamically linked together.”
“The students have been wonderful to work with,” says Jim Conkwright, the district’s general manager. “We believe they took the district’s needs to heart and treated it as a personal project. We can’t praise the Texas Tech students enough for the work they put into the water district program.
Before the GIS project, the water district used more than 300 topographic maps to manually pinpoint the location and permit numbers of water wells. Because of the historical significance and importance of the maps, Texas Tech was able to borrow the maps for only brief periods to digitally scan them using a high-resolution scanner — it took a team of five undergraduate students who helped run the project for an entire semester to scan and rectify all of the maps.
After the maps were scanned, the location of each well was digitized, and information about each well was entered into the database — inputting the map data took the students another semester to complete. Once the database was finished, senior computer science major Heath Bowlin developed a software application to manage the permit information for the district’s wells.
“This project has enabled us to give our under- graduate students experience that they wouldn’t otherwise have,” Barbato says. “They work in the local community with a high-profile regional agency. They’ve done a fabulous job of interfacing with the water district personnel. This has been a fantastic project for all of us — professors, students and the district.”
“It’s extremely important for the undergraduates,” Mulligan notes. “The field of Geographic Information Systems is expanding extremely fast. We can provide the training and the background technology, but what most employers are looking for are students who have experience working with the technology. And that’s where projects like this are extremely beneficial to the employment potential of our undergraduates.”
“This project gave the undergraduates an opportunity for a hands-on lab,” says Conkwright. “We found the students to be innovative, bright, energetic, and very easy to work with.”
Matthew Crawford, a May 2003 graduate of Texas Tech, was one of the students who worked on the project with the water district. He also believes that the project accomplished many worthwhile goals. “It was great having an opportunity to work with the state-of-the-art GIS technology and participate in a meaningful project that affects one of our area’s most important resources — water.”
“About 80 other water districts operate in the state,” says Barbato. “We’re hoping when this permit management application and database are launched by the High Plains Underground Water District that other Texas water districts will be interested in having Texas Tech and our undergraduates help them manage their water resources.”
Story produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing, 806-742-2136
Photo by Artie Limmer
Illustrated by Misty Pollard
Web layout by Kristen DeLisle