BACKGROUND

In 2005, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Eastern Region supported the development of the Connecticut River Watershed Atlas as part the agency's Connecticut River Watershed Sustainability Project. Sustainability encompasses a certain set of long-term goals to maintain healthy ecosystems and the human communities that depend on them; it focuses particularly on how people maintain or restore the composition, structure, and function of natural and modified ecosystems to meet the needs of current and future generations. More information on the USGS Connecticut River Watershed Sustainability Project can be found at: http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2005/1292/.

This web site is designed to serve relevant data to natural resource and water professionals, planners, and the general public so that informed decisions can be made regarding resource management. A longer-term objective of the project is to create future scenario models that could predict how watershed changes influence water quality and quantity, the biological health of the watershed, and potentially, human health.

The Connecticut River Watershed Atlas is an interactive web mapping application that displays physical, chemical, biological and societal data for the entire Connecticut River Watershed. The effort, led by the USGS NH-VT Water Science Center in Pembroke NH, facilitates the sharing of data from other agencies and organizations. This first version of the Atlas shares information developed by The Nature Conservancy (TNC). TNC has developed an ecological planning framework for New England that characterizes similar terrestrial and aquatic regions.

Using interactive tools developed for the Atlas, stream and watershed information for a selected stream segment in the Connecticut River Watershed can be obtained as a custom report along with the display of the watershed boundary. Together, the Atlas map layers and information output from the custom tools allow the user to view characteristics of the watershed as a whole or to target selected areas within the watershed.