As Earth Day Turns 50, Dane County Sets Goals and Strategies to Fight Climate Change, including Knowing Water
The County of Dane, Wisconsin has released The 2020 Dane County Climate Action Plan – Today’s Opportunity for a Better Tomorrow. The Climate Action Plan (CAP) provides a roadmap of recommended policies and projects to achieve emission reduction targets and to develop resilience to the harmful impacts of a changing climate.
In its focus on water resilience, the CAP states that “A community groundwater monitoring network would greatly enrich the understanding of groundwater and groundwater-surface water interactions, within the four watersheds of Dane County. A nation-leading network could be built thanks to the technology developed by, and in partnership with, the Wisconsin company Wellntel Inc. which provides a cloud-based platform for building networks of high-value monitoring points to collect real-time groundwater-level data.”
This community-based Local Network will directly support the existing Dane County Groundwater Flow Model, a leading-edge platform developed in 2016 by the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey and the US Geological Survey, and funded by Dane County, and municipalities and public water utilities across the county. Vital groundwater data will be collected with this new observation network that will include citizen scientists, remote monitoring, and real-time analytical tools and be used to create detailed inset models, support recalibration, and importantly, engage the community in the process.
The CAP states that “The Dane County model would be greatly strengthened with data collected by the community groundwater monitoring network, providing real-time data with temporal and spatial density that will increase the value of the model as a decision support tool and adding time-series data in locations of greatest interest.”
Wellntel Local Networks are designed to simplify data collection while also sharing information with experts and stakeholders.
“Wellntel is proud to be collaborating with Dane County and its partners on this historic, important project”
– Charles Dunning, Wellntel, VP Business Development.