Developing sound recommendations for a shared a body of water is a lot like following a recipe: if you don’t know how ingredients will interact, the results can end up falling short of what you were expecting.
International Watersheds Initiative
A project designed to help improve the data needed to properly share water between Canada and the United States in the St. Mary and Milk River basins has completed its first step, paving the way for field work over the next year.
If you’re planning repairs to your house or just figuring out what to spend your money on, it’s good to prioritize. The IJC does the same thing, as staff members and Commissioners work to determine what the Commission’s needs are in years to come, and how to spend money most effectively.
Knowing how high the waters have been in the past is important when looking at waterfront development. A pair of markers denoting the highest recorded levels of Osoyoos Lake aim to make people aware of the past when planning for the future.
The Members of the DHTF can be seen on the Confluence Wiki Website.
The roles of the DHTF include data, oversight, communications, and facilitating stewardship.
Realising the challenges of inconsistent data, and the potential advantages gained by a better alignment of geospatial hydrographic datasets along the international border, the IJC convened the Transboundary Hydrographic Data Harmonization Task Force (DHTF) in 2008.
A digital geospatial hydrographic dataset contains information about an area’s surface water, including its rivers, streams, canals, lakes, ponds, glaciers, dams, coastlines, and watershed boundaries.
Lake Winnipeg suffers from harmful algal blooms caused by excess nutrients, and work by provincial agencies and the IJC’s own modeling suggest that a significant portion of those nutrients come from the Red River, which runs from the United States into Canada.