Abstract

Storing Stream Restoration Assets and Representations in a Geographic Database
Track: Water Resources
Authors: John Dean

The Gwinnett County, Georgia Watershed Improvement Program (WIP) has acquired stream-restoration-related capital gains. Directed to inventory these for asset management and cartographic rendering, our attention is turned to GIS data modeling. Stream channels, however, lend themselves poorly to traditional GIS line abstraction. Specifically, their varying characteristics procreate swarms of splits and merges along their centerlines.

We answer this problem, courtesy of ESRI "route feature, with a linearly referenced data model. We store distance downstream-wise as M-values in our stream centerlines. We can then store variations as beginning and ending points in a related table.
For cartographic presentation, we use ESRI's Representations model to database-store intuitive morphological shapes of individual assets.
We recommend linear referencing to other stream-mapping efforts as a way to store all continuously changing stream characteristics.
We propose that the fitting of highly customized stream restorations into discrete, non-overlapping GIS categories could be an area for future research.