Smart Balancing of Agricultural and Ecosystem Values
Guiding sustainable groundwater management
Solano is home to both valuable agriculture as well as vibrant Delta ecosystems. FlowWest helped Solano County and local water resources managers comply with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. Groundwater extraction is not uniformly monitored in the County, challenging long-term sustainability planning. Our team solved this problem by developing tools to organize, create, and synthesize available data in new ways. This gave managers a better water resources understanding and a foundation for planning.
Powerful tools maximize use of critical information
We conducted consumptive use modeling of water demand throughout the County based on crop type, compared water demands and deliveries, and developed maps of historical groundwater level trends. Our team also developed a data library for the County that includes measured and modeled groundwater and surface water data that will serve as a framework for future data acquisition and support future modeling efforts. We then developed a cutting-edge, customized web application to effectively communicate the data for the benefit of decision making.
Success With data-driven, Personal collaboration
Collaboration is one of FlowWest’s core values - and this project put our collaborative capabilities to the test. Successfully acquiring existing data that were spread across multiple agencies and organizations and making sure to capture institutional knowledge not always captured in the data itself challenged us. We succeeded with a personal approach - working face-to-face with growers, water managers, and decision makers as we developed our models and web application to ensure we provided stakeholders with tools to quickly understand data sources and to influence data usage.
