Project Details
A Roadmap to Intelligent Watersheds
Overview/Objective
Watersheds play a critical role in supporting energy generation, drinking water supplies, agriculture, and recreation across the nation. Rising demand for these essential services, coupled with environmental changes, is placing unprecedented stress on water resources,, increasing uncertainty and competition and impacting everything from reservoir operations to river-basin management. Meanwhile, advancements in monitoring, data sharing, supercomputing, modeling, and artificial intelligence technologies offer opportunities to connect data more effectively with decision-making, particularly at the complex watershed scale.
In response to these challenges and opportunities, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)—in collaboration with the Internet of Water Coalition and other key stakeholders—are working to create advanced watershed resource management systems that digitally integrate disparate sources of information. These so-called Intelligent Watersheds will enable smarter, more informed decisions that balance complex and evolving water resource needs.
The project aims to provide hydropower operators, municipalities, and other stakeholders with technical tools and institutional connections that improve system performance and resilience.
Methods and Accomplishments
"During the project period from early 2023 through 2024, the Intelligent Watersheds team completed several key activities:
Data Needs Assessment:
Designed and administered a comprehensive questionnaire to identify critical data types relevant to watershed-scale hydropower decisions.
Stakeholder Discussions:
Completed 43 expert consultations with professionals involved in hydropower and watershed information, including data collection, management, modeling, and decision-making. These conversations clarified current practices and helped refine the core ideas within watershed intelligence.
Virtual Workshops:
Held interactive whiteboard sessions involving more than two dozen stakeholders, who helped identify emerging solutions and priority actions for creating more intelligent watershed systems.
Case Study in Upper Colorado River Basin:
Conducted targeted small-group discussions in partnership with the Internet of Water Coalition, mapping data connections and decision pathways within a real-world watershed.
Sharing Early Results:
Presented findings and discussed technical and institutional solutions at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) 2023 and 2024 Fall Meetings, and at the Electric Power Research Institute's (EPRI) Long-term Ecological Change Workshop in November 2024.
Impact & Recommendations
To date, the input from industry, government, and research experts has elucidated several key areas of opportunity:
Building on existing intensive monitoring and modeling efforts:
Existing initiatives such as the Department of Energy-supported Scientific Focus Areas (SFAs) and the U.S. Geological Survey’s Next Generation Water Observing System (NGWOS) currently provide extensive basin-wide monitoring and modeling. These initiatives could be enhanced by explicitly incorporating regulated systems—such as dams and hydropower facilities—which have traditionally received less attention in basin-scale studies. Integrating these regulated components will significantly expand the effectiveness and applicability of watershed-scale resource management.
Improving Coordination Across the Data-to-Decision Pipeline:
Both stakeholders and researchers strongly identified data integration, standardization, and coordination across the data-to-decision process as a major objective. Currently, stakeholders often duplicate efforts by independently collecting, preparing, and analyzing similar datasets. Enhancing cross-sector and inter-agency coordination would significantly streamline efforts, improve accuracy, and increase decision-making efficiency at the watershed level.
Establishing Communities of Practice:
Stakeholders supported developing communities of practice that regularly bring together scientists, infrastructure operators, and policymakers. These communities improve communication, and accelerate the adoption of new analytical approaches, tools, and technologies into everyday decision-making processes.
Through these activities, ORNL and PNNL researchers have charted a clear path toward systems capable of delivering practical, actionable intelligence to stakeholders throughout U.S. watersheds.
Get More Information
For more information or to collaborate, please contact ORNL’s Carly Hansen (hansench@ornl.gov) or PNNL’s Vincent Tidwell (vincent.tidwell@pnnl.gov).
Collaborators
- Internet of Water Coalition: Faith Sternlieb, Amelia Green, Kyle Onda
- PNNL: Vince Tidwell, Nathalie Voisin, Kyle Larson, Andrew White, Maruti Madunuru
