The Great Lakes to Gulf (GLTG) Virtual Observatory will facilitate ready access to water resource information from the Mississippi River and its tributaries, expediting data-to-knowledge-to-policy connections. It is a project of the National Great Rivers Research and Education Center (NGRREC), a partnership of Lewis and Clark Community College and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) (http://www.ngrrec.org/).
The Great Lakes to Gulf (GLTG) Virtual Observatory will incorporate historical and current information about water quality in the rivers, characteristics of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems in the rivers and floodplains, and interactions between humans and various components of the watershed. This data platform will be connected to, and modeled after, the Illinois Indiana Sea Grant (IISG) Great Lakes Monitoring web site (http://greatlakesmonitoring.org/).
The project will include real time reporting and visualization of nitrate data and GREON data within a cyber-infrastructure framework for use primarily by scientific users. Making the data available in this way will facilitate collaborations and data sharing, help prioritize data gathering and reliable knowledge needed to optimize large scale conservation programs, enable automated data extraction interfaces with highly visual decision support tools, and identify data gaps and the need for additional data collection activities.
The GLTG virtual observatory uses the same ISDA software technologies as the Great Lakes Monitoring project including Clowder and GeoDashboard.