SCCWRP transitioning new stream condition scoring tool to managers

SCCWRP and its partners have launched a series of outreach and training exercises to teach watershed managers how to use a new scoring tool for evaluating the biological health of streams across California.

The California Stream Condition Index, co-developed by SCCWRP, represents an important advancement in stream monitoring, allowing managers to generate condition scores using site-specific biological expectations that account for the stream’s unique environmental characteristics.

In October, the state’s Surface Water Ambient Monitoring Program (SWAMP) published a CSCI technical memo and accompanying instruction manual co-authored by SCCWRP that explains how to calculate index scores. Two peer-reviewed articles about the development of the CSCI, meanwhile, have been published as open-source journal articles in Freshwater Science, accessible here and here.

SCCWRP also has helped SWAMP build an interactive map to make CSCI scores for nearly 2,000 streams publicly accessible, prepared a two-page fact sheet for non-technical audiences, and co-hosted a workshop in September in Sacramento to train staff at regional boards, who, in turn, will train end users within their regions.

While SCCWRP’s short-term goal is to help the bioassessment community calculate CSCI scores with currently available tools (specifically, ArcGIS and the R statistical programming language), the ultimate goal is to make the process automated and thus accessible to a larger audience.

To that end, SCCWRP has been working with the State Water Board to build an automated, web-accessible CSCI calculator that can be used with minimal training and no software licensing requirements.

SCCWRP and SWAMP expect to release the CSCI calculator in late 2016.