A Model for Stewardship

When astronauts return from their first mission to space, they often speak about the wonder and beauty of Earth, and how they have a reinforced sense of responsibility for the planet. While BECWA doesn’t build spaceships, we do foster locally based stewardship for our watershed. That is why BECWA is working to use 21st-century modeling and software technology to bring our own birds’ eye view of the Black Earth Creek Watershed to life! This dual platform project will serve as a powerful tool for education, imagination, and communication, and ideally will inspire determination for maintaining a healthy watershed.

BECWA envisions building a table-sized 3D model of the entire watershed with accurate topography, waterway mapping, and callouts for major locations and roads. Watershed residents and visitors will be able to pinpoint areas of interest as they investigate the model to better understand the watershed’s physical and dynamic features and, ultimately, appreciate how all parts of watershed are connected.

Conceptual mock up of a table-sized 3D watershed map

The second piece of this project is a publicly accessible web experience to communicate the story and geography of the BEC Watershed with interactive mapping tools. This custom designed web experience or ‘StoryMap’ will enable users to easily navigate around the watershed, turn on and off various landscape features, track stream monitoring data, and even be able to sketch green infrastructure practices to see their impact on watershed health in real time. StoryMap users will be able to observe the different ways that development, farmland, forest, and wetland impact the watershed and those who live there. The entire project will be portable and thus can appear at libraries, schools, local government meetings, and outreach events in watershed communities and beyond. BECWA will be pursuing grant funding and contributions to this project throughout 2025. Please reach out to info@becwa.org for more information!