Abstract

Montana Water Right Point of Diversion Migration
Track: Water Resources
Authors: Evan Hammer, Troy Blandford, Duane Lund, Jim Robinson

The Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation's (DRNC) Water Resources Division administers a comprehensive water rights database that contains a variety of information related to water use; in particular, points of diversion (POD). This data is vital information for water resource professionals, but the POD data has a major limitation which is the means by which PODs are stored in a geographic information system (GIS). Presently, PODs are spatially represented as centroids of the legal land description maintained in the water rights database. This is suitable for visual reference, but it cannot serve as a parameter for in depth modeling or analysis.
The DNRC and the Montana State Library Natural Resource Information System (NRIS) are working to enhance the spatial representation of PODs by referencing them to the National Hydrography Dataset (NHD). This presentation will report on the progress of this project and discuss challenges encountered in the process.