In support of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) stewardship program goals to improve, maintain and enrich the positional and attribute accuracy of the National Hydrography Dataset (NHD), the Vermont Center for Geographic Information, Inc. (VCGI) has created a map centric feedback website.

With participation from the Vermont Regional Planning Commissions, the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources, the USFS Green Mountain National Forest, USFWS and a number of state NHD stewards across the country, VCGI has composed this pilot website as a first step towards creating a sustainable state NHD stewardship foundation.  

As the NHD steward for Vermont, VCGI’s approach to accomplishing the goal of stewardship is to provide stakeholders with a clear, readily accessible and easy-to-use web interface that provides users with a gateway to facilitate feedback. By creating a controlled environment with base map services, navigation tools and a simple feedback form, users can readily convey updates. This form, or “maintenance ticket”, will also allow user created shapefiles and maps to be submitted. Review of these forms will be conducted by VCGI on a periodic basis with all of the accepted changes to be made by a trained operator using sanctioned USGS procedures. VCGI has employed ”best of breed” technology for developing the tool and has made the code available to other parties interested in customizing it for their own purposes, e.g., USGS, states and others.

Having developed and implemented a local resolution NHD (1:5k) dataset, commonly referred to as the Vermont Hydrography Dataset (VHD), five years ago, the foundation for buy-in by numerous stakeholders has firmly established the VHD as the primary organizational spatial dataset for hydrology based efforts in Vermont. With two attribute-enrichment efforts recently completed, it is of growing importance to support the development side of the program with greater update and maintenance efforts. These are core tenets of the Stewardship program.

*SWaMT is being served via the Internet through the State of Vermont Department of Information and Innovation.

For a developing list of steps and helpful information about using the tool please select the “HELP” button.