The Confluence

A confluence is the place where two streams meet and combine flow. The DANalytics Confluence is the place where watershed data, scientific tools, and the people who care about water all come together.

The water community has more open data than ever — millions of records flowing into the Water Quality Portal, USGS NWIS, EPA ATTAINS, and dozens of state and tribal databases. But that data lives in spreadsheets, query interfaces, and CSV downloads. It is hard to see. It is harder still to talk about. The Confluence is being built to change that.

Open data is only as useful as the conversations it enables.

What the Confluence Will Be

The Confluence is being built as a public space for watershed data exploration — somewhere a curious citizen, a watershed coordinator, a tribal scientist, or a grad student can go to see what the data is actually saying. Some of what will live here:

• Interactive watershed maps that combine USGS streamgages, SNOTEL snowpack stations, Water Quality Portal sample sites, and other agency monitoring networks into a single explorable surface
• Time-lapse parameter visualizations — E. coli concentrations across a season, dissolved oxygen during a snowmelt event, conductivity through a wildfire
• Watershed-scale pattern dashboards showing how individual sites fit into broader regional dynamics
• Annotated case studies that walk through specific events — a fish kill, a fouling event, a record runoff year — using real data
• Community features that let scientists and watershed advocates contribute observations, ask questions, and build on each other’s work

Each of these is being built incrementally. The Confluence will grow as the data grows.

A Glimpse of What’s Coming

The first Confluence-style artifact is already live inside the Project FLOW app for Eagle Valley Middle School: an interactive watershed map combining the school’s HOBO sensor with the surrounding network of agency stations and NLCD land cover data.

See the live watershed map →

That map is intentionally small — one sensor in one watershed. The Confluence will be built around the same architecture, scaled across the West.

Be Part of Building It

If you are a scientist, watershed advocate, monitoring program coordinator, or simply someone who cares about how water data reaches the public — DANalytics would like to hear from you. The Confluence is being built openly, and the shape of it will be guided by the people who plan to use it.

To follow Confluence development or share what you would want to see in it, contact daniel@danalyticsenv.com.

Built on Open Data

WQP · USGS · NOAA · NASA POWER · ATTAINS