Comparison of State and national environmental websites

[Tabitha Madzura <madzurat@missouri.edu>]

Good morning,

My name is Tabitha Madzura. I work for the University of Missouri Outreach & Extension Division in the Water Quality Program. I manage an information website: The Missouri Watershed Information Network (MoWIN). Our mission is to assist Missourians in locating and accessing watershed information; our goal is increasing knowledge about current watershed conditions and best management practices. We provide information about: watershed events, meetings, current projects, local contacts, human resources, financial assistance, technical assistance, educational resources, watershed-related information by county, resource management, planning, restoration and research data. After a survey conducted in 1996, this was the kind of information natural resource agencies, business and industry and interested citizens said they wanted. Realizing that there is a lot of information (in hard and electronic formats) relating to watershed stewardship, we knew it was/is time consuming, and sometimes frustrating for Internet users to navigate through the millions of websites to get the information they want. With MoWIN, we access, collect and compile information relevant to Missouri's watersheds from various state and federal agencies plus other related entities into this website. So far we have had a great impact. We conducted a survey earlier this year which indicated that MoWIN is a good source and tool for watershed planning, initiatives, water quality, services and assistance providers as well as natural resources agencies contact information. The web site information is diverse, easy to use, saves respondents time and frustration, and has exceeded respondents' expectations.  Links to the other involved agencies and offices are very helpful, the website is easy to use yet contains an incredible amount of information, and that MoWIN has evolved beyond the original expressed interest. Using this effort we have successfully linked the national and local resources, made EPA, USGS, NRCS information readily accessible to people. The national sites provide comprehennsive national information; I belive each state library etc., should devise a suitable model that would provide a warehouse of this information to reduce time taken to navigate. EPA and others have done a great job of putting together data etc, and it is our responsibility to access this information for grassroots use. Realizing that some of our audience may not necessarity have access to computers or less computer literate, we have secured a limited amount of funding to put together a hard copy of the available state and federal resources. The hard copy will be distributed throught state and county plus university extension offices. We market this information concept/model via conferences, presentations workshops, brochures etc. The website address is: http://outreach.missouri.edu/mowin. We hope this can be a useful model for making use of the EPA etc., information and to bring interest in watershed and related information closer to home. Because of the tremendous Amount of information, I think it would be difficult for EPA to try and make that information accessible to people. I belive they could use local resources for outreach purposes.