Visualizing Community Input for Yampa River Management Planning
Nicole Seltzer1* and David Groves2*
1 River Network
2 RAND Corporation
In 2019, the Yampa White Green Basin Roundtable began an Integrated Water Management Plan for the Yampa River basin in northwest Colorado. The goal is to combine community input with science and engineering assessments to identify actions to protect existing and future water uses and support healthy river ecosystems in the face of growing populations, changing land uses, and climate uncertainty. To initiate a two-way conversation with basin residents, a team of local non-profit organizations spent a year surveying and interviewing more than 150 irrigators, municipal/industrial water users and environmental/recreational stakeholders. This presentation will follow the (sometimes messy) journey we followed from developing consistent interview templates to coding the data for consistency to analyzing it in Tableau software to the Advisory Committee’s consideration of what the data says and what we should do about it. We will reflect on the benefits and challenges of this approach, and provide recommendations for those who want to try it in their watershed.