California's widely diverse rivers are among the state's most valuable resources. Rivers are also among California's most damaged ecosystems because of the many demands placed upon them over time. In 1992, the California Resources Agency determined there was a need to develop a good foundation of river-related information to assist planning and decision-making. The California River's Assessment (CARA) was thus begun and now comprises more than twenty federal, state and local agencies, and private organizations.

The purpose of CARA is to develop an information system that can provide a comprehensive inventory and evaluation of California's river resources and to make this information easily accessible to decision-makers and the general public. The World-Wide Web serves as a vehicle for disseminating this data in a user-friendly fashion. Our intention is to move beyond the simple display of static snapshots of river data by allowing non-specialist users to query public information on river resources. The strategy is to make the GIS and databases accessible through the World-Wide Web using readily-available access software, which is also being incorporated by the commercial on-line services. Equally important is the ability to remotely submit updates and corrections using the same software systems.

The California Riparian Evaluation System (CARES) is a habitat evaluation tool designed to be used by decision makers who are not experienced with GIS. The current version was designed for the Wildlife Conservation Board of the California Department of Fish and Game to support their analysis of how riparian habitat restoration funds should be allocated. CARES, developed by the California Rivers Assessment (CARA) staff at the University of California, Davis, allows for the identification of riparian areas of high quality and diversity which are at risk or which have a high potential for conservation or restoration. The system is comprised of a state-of-the-art ArcView 3.0 graphical user interface through which users may alter evaluation criteria priorities to match conservation goals. The application operates by allowing users to specify a mapping of the domain of a coverage onto a [-1,1] score. The users may then specify relative weightings for each variable and construct a map of the normalized sum of the weighted scores. Results are displayed as ArcView shapefiles which highlight potential sites for conservation based on criteria chosen. Currently five data layers are available for inclusion in the user-defined criteria selection: Land Use/Land Cover, Land Management Status, Flow Regime (Natural or Altered), Potential Plant Species Richness, and Potential Vertebrate Species Richness. It is straightforward to add more layers to CARES as requested by users. The CARES system has recently been ported to Spatial Analyst which dramatically reduces processing time.

Organized hydrographic information is vital to the success of environmental planning and management. Joint efforts from the USGS and U.S. EPA to produce a spatial base and attribute model, respectively, have resulted in an alpha release of the River Reach File, a national hydrographic standard (RF3-alpha). In California, this represents over 200,000 records of hydrographic features maintained and distributed by the state's Teale GIS Technology Center in ARC/INFO format for use by public agencies and the private sector. This paper summarizes the key events, beginning in 1992, with the California Department of Fish and Game's GIS program, which have led to the revision and correction of over 60,000 RF3 records in cooperation with federal, state, University of California at Davis (UCD), and private entities. The detail in the revisions ranges from complete hydrograhic address enumeration in portions of the Eel River basin, to statewide reconciliation of USGS hydrographic names with the RF1 and RF2 names. Benefits in addition to the strong cooperative relationships identified include the enabling of Internet-based search and query capabilities by state-level programs such as the California Environmental Resources Evaluation System (CERES) and the California Rivers Assessment (CARA). Future development of RF3 will focus on empowering individuals and watershed interest groups with a robust spatial and attribute standard for hydrographic information of all types, extents, and applications.

In California, water quality assessment information is currently reported via a FoxPro (DOS) system known as the WaterBody System (WBS). WBS does not have a spatial component, and therefore users typically enter information for large named water courses. Several states, including California, have developed links from WBS waterbodies to EPA River Reach File (RF3-alpha) features, spatially referencing WBS to an existing nationwide hydrography layer. This spatial referencing step, however, has typically occurred after local scientists and resource managers entered assessment information into the WBS.

In order to improve water quality reporting, the University of California, Davis (UCD) Information Center for the Environment (ICE) has developed GeoWBS, a customized graphical user interface using ArcView and the Dialog Designer Extension that allows users entering water quality assessment information to better spatially define waterbodies. This system links the assessment information to RF3-alpha, permits direct SQL connectivity to the underlying WBS architecture, and helps standardize user input. Starting in 1998, the California Regional Water Quality Control Board (RWQCB) scientists will be trained to use the system and will report their assessments on more spatially refined waterbodies. Consequently, the water quality assessment information reported to EPA will be more spatially precise, queriable through a graphical interface, and will likely result in improved water quality monitoring, reporting, and policy-setting.

In cooperation with several federal and state agencies, the Information Center for the Environment (ICE) at the University of California Davis is analyzing the ability to cross-reference information linked to California's hydrography dataset (a modified form of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's River Reach File) to the new National Hydrography Dataset. California's Reach File contains a critical but non-standard foreign key that is essential to many research applications. Additionally, ICE plans to test, verify, and recommend enhancements to cross-referencing methods to improve the transfer of reach-code information from earlier hydrography datasets in California to the NHD.

The California Rivers Assessment (CARA) is a computer-based geographic data management system designed to give resource managers, policy-makers, landowners, scientists and interested citizens rapid access to essential information and tools with which to make sound decisions about the conservation and use of California's rivers. CARA is intended to provide an evaluation of the environmental conditions of California's rivers by integrating existing data from previously uncoordinated contributors and organizations, and to improve river conservation and management by making this information available and useful. The assessment utilizes a suite of watershed facts, processed in ESRI’s ARC/INFO and ArcView Geographic Information System software, to provide an objective view of the watershed integrity of California's riverine resources. These watershed facts focus on existing riparian and aquatic resources: biodiversity, water quality, and resource management activities. Access to this multi-leveled, interconnected database of California watershed environmental data is provided and enhanced by innovative World-Wide-Web technology.

The Information Center for the Environment (ICE) at the University of California, Davis has been cooperating with various federal, state, and local agencies on the Natural Resource Projects Inventory (NRPI) to locate and catalog watershed-scale environmental management and restoration projects throughout the State. One of the goals of NRPI is to represent these projects spatially so they can be viewed in conjunction with other critical data layers. Currently, 1,464 projects are spatially referenced out of a total of over 1,700 projects in the NRPI database. This spatial online database will allow the public and decision makers to derive more effective conclusions regarding ecological restoration.

In 1998, the California Regional Water Quality Control Board (RWQCB) scientists were trained to use the Geospatial Waterbody System (GeoWBS), developed by the Information Center for the Environment (ICE). The Regional Board scientists are currently using the system to report waterbody assessments to the EPA, as mandated by the Clean Water Act. As part of ICE’s continuing work with the GeoWBS database, ICE staff members visited each RWQCB in California to assist the scientists with geographic delineation of waterbodies that will be included in the 303(d) report.