The pace of new entries and novelty of content on the Internet (the "net") is like a flood year hitting land that has never before seen rain. New stream channels are gouged overnight, and frequently are choked with a tangle of informational debris. But as the storms pass, the new landscape has some attractive features that may well support life as we know it.
For the water researcher, or for anyone who wants to tune in more closely to watersheds, the info-storms have mobilized remarkable wealth of information and mixing of heretofore isolated sub-species of environmental science.
While most of the breeding and feeding and interspecial interaction still occurs in the relatively quiet pools and eddies of electronic mail, much of the net's major mass-wasting, and most of the media attention, is on the "whitewater" of the World Wide Web (the "web"). This phenomenon that has appeared from nowhere over the past two years (actually from the European Particle Physics Laboratory, like a new chain reaction) provides instant informational gratification to millions of computer users able to point and click. And unlike the numbers of fish in some rivers we could mention, the population on the web is exploding.
The web's graphical capability - "hyper-linking" text, pictures and even sounds - is particularly helpful for most kinds of environmental information, which tends toward maps, pictures, and graphs. Several geographic information servers that create and display multiple-theme maps based on criteria the user specifies are operating already. Want to see the soils and streams and slope steepness all plotted together for your watershed? Should be available soon.
Printing a list of environmental web servers (the computer that sends you information is called a "server") is not especially useful. Like the Buddhist's metaphor of reality as a jewel-laden web in which each jewel reflects every other, the WWW is intensely inter-referenced. Most web pages have links to similar or related sites. (A particular body of content is called a "web site," made up of "web pages." The main page for a site is called a "home page.") Web authors usually seem to be trying to anticipate the interests of their visitors: "If you decided to come here, you might also want to go here and here and maybe here." By following links from one site to the next, you can find most any particular sub-genre you looking for, and serendipitously stumble across cool and unusual backwaters in the process. Or you can get lost, which is half the fun. Fortunately your browser (the software program that brought you to the web in the first place) drops crumbs to help you find your way back to what you thought you wanted to do in the first place.
Like our thought processes sometimes, we may get places that leave us wondering how the heck we got there and what were we looking for anyhow?
Guides to web sites work better as web sites than on paper-- server availability and linking can change quickly.
Visit our own WMC WWW site for other links and, soon, pages and pages of hot watershed pointers. On-line they use virtually no natural resources, and can be updated as needed - and updating is needed a lot. To get started, you need a few good portals, sites that have good links to start from.
Aristotle divided the world into four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. A multi-skilled contractor I know has four toolboxes, each labled with one of the elements, and it makes surprising good sense. This makes some sense for environmental information categories as well. Here goes.
USGS Geology Information (linking soon)
Doorway to a world of geologic info, projects, programs, and maps. This agency is in the info business and it shows: they were among the earliest of the government servers to go up. Most agencies now have at least one Web Site. USGS servers still look and work the best, though NASA runs a close second, in my view.
Institute of soil sciences at the, Department of Agriculture, University of Gottengen, Germany.
Nice pictures of soil profiles, lecture notes and bulletins. Academic flavor. You can have it in English or Deutsch.
The World Soil Data set was compiled from the FAO Soil Map of the World by L. Zobler (1986). The major components of the data set are soil classification, soil texture, soil slope and a file reconciling the differences between Matthew's Global Vegetation Data Set and FAO sources. The resolution of the data is one degree latitude by one degree longitude. Terrific resource for soil geography education.
Cybersoils Massey University Dept of Soil Science
This new Zealand server is mostly potential. Watch this one to see if it meets it's vision of the place to start for world soils information.
This site is a fine example of serving place-based information, based on watersheds, taking advantage of modern computer map-making capabilities. Requesting a map with specific things shown gives a taste of what's to come in access to public geographic data. It takes awhile to get your map back. It's worth the wait. This server, in addition to serving you a custom color screen-resolution map, will also, if you like, create a high-resolution (300 dpi) version of your map and place it in a publicly-accessible computer for a few days for your retrieval. Neat. This site is showing the way. Good pointers too.
Choose what lines and resources you want on a map of Canada, and this system will build it for you and serve back a lovely full color map, usually in less than a minute. The National Atlas Information Service (NAIS) of Canada sponsors this site.
REGIS: Environmental Planning GIS at Berkeley
Here's a brand new site with a terrific start on WWW-based GIS service. BSF Bay ARea coverages loaded. Based on GRASS system. Very promising.
This site has the most current index of watershed topics we've found, called, "Watersheds on the Internet." Good point of embarkation for environmental research.
EcoNet's Water, Seas, Oceans, and Rivers Directory:
This page is an index of Web sites addressing aqueous parts of the Earth. Looks well maintained.
The California Environmental Resources Evaluation System (CERES)
This is a California Resources Agency project aiming toward a vision of a "comprehensive" repository and access point for all data about the State's environment. Still mostly potential, but off to a fine start. Careful here though: visions that are too top-down might just bump into the relative simplicity of putting up local servers and pages.
USGS Water Resources of the United States
This site has a great wealth of information about waters, streams and rivers, and access to the enormous archives of data collected and held by the USGS.
Water On-Line (linking soon)
This is a non-profit consensus project to advance the use of the Internet to help solve California's water problems. The site even includes their meeting minutes if you'd like to participate. Other non-profits that want to be more public could take a cue from this one.
Earth and Environmental Sciences Center - Hydrology Web
This site is run by the Earth and Environmental Sciences Center at the Pacific Northwest Laboratory in Washington. It's rich with lots of resources and links.
El nino to Waterworld, this site has lots of resources and links related
to climate change, both short-and long-term. Climate modeling is the most
computer hungry field there is, and climate modelers wont be happy with
computer power for the foreseeable future. Somebody once said that the only
computer fast enough to model the atmosphere is the atmosphere itself. Hum.
Joint Institute for the Study
of Atmosphere and Ocean
Lots of links here for the air-heads who study the fluid we swim in and breathe.
Scripps Institute of Oceanography
One of the best of many pages that provide links to weather info and weather servers.
The University of Illinois Cloud Catalog
Whoosh! Closet cloud-lovers, pilots, and the merely curious will dig this one.
Pictures of the Sun, mostly in ways you have never seen it. The sun in soft x-rays is a natural work of art, different each day, suitable for framing and pondering. Ahh.
The Space Environment Laboratory (SEL) concerns itself with the Sun and the environment.
Provides real-time monitoring and forecasting of solar and geophysical events.
Mees Solar Observatory in Hawaii.
White Light, Calcium-K, and Stokes Magnetograms of the sun. Worth looking even if you're not sure what this means.
The International Space Environment Service
Good pointers to other solar sites.
The interactive channels on the Internet are alive and well, and too numerous to list on paper. E-mail is still the most important use of the Net (see WMC e-mail Registry). Newsgroups, mailing lists and not-yet-on-the-net Bulletin Board Systems are a door to interacting with people of like interests and work. Usually opening one door will reveal the relevant others. Simply post a question to a group or mailing list about what you are looking for and the answer or good clue where to look next will come back.
Lots of mailings lists are operating. They come and go quite fluidly, and lists of the lists tend to be out of date. You can try the web site Publicly accessible mailing lists for a pretty good attempt at a mailing list. Best way to find other lists of interest is to post a question to a list that's close, subjectwise.
Here are a few:
Soils
List Name: SOILS-L@unl.edu
Server:listserv@unl.edu
A forum for the discussion of all subjects dealing with soil science. Soil
physics, chemistry, genesis, classification, mineralogy, fertility, conservation,
etc. may be discussed within this unmoderated group. The formation of this
group has been sanctioned by The American Society of Agronomy and the Soil
Science Society of America.
Hydrology
List Name: Hydrology
Server: LISTSERV@eng.monash.edu.au
For those interested in hydrology - the science of water in the environment.
It is relevant to those outside of traditional engineering hydrology, and
emphasizes multidisciplinary, fundamental, scientific research in hydrology.
Solar
List Name: SSIN (Student Solar Information Network)
Server: Listserv@bham.ac.uk
Contact: m.e.thornton@bham.ac.uk (Mark Thornton)
Provides information, news, resources and conference details free to anyone
studying solar and renewable energy.
Wind
List Name: Wind Energy Weekly
Contact: tgray@igc.apc.org (Tom Gray)
Weekly newsletter covering wind energy development worldwide, global climate
change, energy policy, energy and the environment.
California Watershed Projects Inventory (linking soon)
The idea here is to establish a database and geographic information system (GIS) to improve statewide access to information on watershed projects and associated data in California.
World Wide Web sites
http://www.nws.mbay.net/home.html#Satellite
http://www.earthwatch.com/SKYWATCH/skywatch.html
http://cirrus.sprl.umich.edu/wxnet/
http://www.princeton.edu/Webweather/ww.html
http://www.metolab3.umd.edu/meteorology.html
http://blueskies.sprl.umich.edu
http://wxp.eas.purdue.edu/main.html
