Data Gaps—Improving Hydrologic Information in Clark County, Nevada

Water resources in Clark County, Nevada, are important to public supply and to endangered and threatened species and the ecosystems that sustain those species. The majority of those ecosystems are located on federally managed public lands, which comprise over 85% of Clark County. Currently, the majority of municipal water comes from the Colorado River, but as the population of Clark County, including Las Vegas, continues to increase, demands on local and regional ground-water supplies will increase. A comprehensive, centrally located, publicly accessible hydrologic database is a valuable tool to assist in monitoring and managing ground-water resources and in identifying changing conditions caused by an increase in water use that may affect sensitive desert ecosystems. The federal agencies that manage land in Clark County currently do not use a centralized, publicly accessible database to store their hydrologic data.

USGS maintains the National Water Information System (NWIS) that includes the Ground-Water Site Information (GWSI) and Water-Quality Data (QWDATA) databases, portions of which are publicly accessible on the World Wide Web via NWISWeb. For wells and springs in Clark County on federally-managed land, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has requested that the USGS assist in compiling existing data, entering the data into NWIS, analyzing the data to identify “data gaps,” and collecting new data to help fill those gaps.

Objectives

Use NWIS as a central repository for all ground-water and water-quality data collected on federal land in Clark County, Nevada. This would allow all stakeholders, including the public, to access hydrologic data easily, to plan future data-collection programs without duplication of efforts, and to manage their ground-water resources based on a common and more comprehensive dataset than previously available.

Strategy and Approach

Two primary tasks will be completed: 1) Compile existing well and spring data collected by federal agencies in Clark County and enter the data into NWIS, and 2) Analyze the data to determine where “data gaps” exist, collect new data to help fill those gaps, and store these new data in NWIS. The project will emphasize spring discharge data, well water-levels, spring and well water-chemistry data, and accurate site-location data.

Relevance and Benefits

Analyzing, collecting, and storing hydrologic data for federal lands in Clark County will allow federal agencies, primarily the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, to better assess and manage their ground-water resources. Additionally, the proposed project addresses three of the four goals outlined in the USGS Strategic Plan: resource managers make decisions based on accurate, reliable, and impartial scientific information, Federal, State, and local governments and the private sector have access to shared national databases of natural resources information, and the public has easy access and availability to Earth science information.