Abstract

Torture: Evaluating Costs and Benefits of Stewardship
Track: Water Resources
Authors: Christina Boggs

Stewardship of framework data is scary. DWR is considering taking on stewardship of the National Hydrography Dataset (NHD). For this, there is a certain amount of trepidation and thorough analysis of both the costs and benefits is important. DWR had a consultant formulate a business case and it was encouraging enough to make us keep digging. We identified both internal and external benefits of us taking on stewardship of California's portion of the NHD and tried to capture as many qualitative and quantitative benefits as we could. Extensive interviews and surveys helped firm up our initial estimates for the costs of stewardship and we were able to start to evaluate the return on investment potential that stewardship could have. This presentation explains some of the torturous aspects of doing a cost and benefit analysis for framework dataset stewardship and how this process has actually increased internal support for stewardship.