Groundwater Information Network

Online Access & Analysis of Canadian Groundwater Information

The Groundwater Information Network (GIN) is developed to improve knowledge of groundwater systems, and enhance groundwater management, through increased access to standardized groundwater information. GIN connects a variety of groundwater information from authoritative sources, including water well databases, water monitoring data, and aquifer and geology maps, to name a few. Provincial and territorial collaborators include British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Québec, Nova-Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador and Yukon, and are still growing. International collaboration with USGS is also underway, to enable cross-border sharing of similar groundwater information. All available information can be accessed through the GIN Portal. As shown in the figure, the GIN Portal provides web applications that enable a human user to view, query and download groundwater information. It also provides web services conforming to open geospatial standards (WMS, WFS, SOS), to enable computer-to-computer requests, such as direct assimilation of the information into other web applications, or into analysis or modeling tools. The web applications show the data over a map of Canada in 2D, and smaller regions can be viewed in 3D. Groundwater features such as water wells, monitoring sites, or aquifers, can be queried one at a time. Multiple items can also be downloaded in a common structure using a variety of convenient digital formats. Supported download formats include: GWML (Groundwater Markup Language), Excel, Google Earth, ESRI Geodatabase, ESRI shape file and PDF.

Outcomes

The Expert Panel on Groundwater from the Council of Canadian Academies identified access to groundwater data as a key priority. To achieve this, the main outcomes of this project are a) a national framework for connecting groundwater information, b) Web access to groundwater data, c) standards for exchanging data, and d) analysis and modeling tools.

For more information

Boyan Brodaric: boyan.brodaric@canada.ca
Éric Boisvert: eric.boisvert2@canada.ca