Open Access Hubs

Ready and free access to reliable water-related data is essential for good decision making. Ideally, Canadians should have access to free, online water data platforms – or “open access hubs” – that bring together various sources of data, knowledge and other water information in a way that is understandable, accessible and sustainable over time for each of Canada’s 25 major watersheds[1]. We believe that when properly designed, an open access hub should:

• focus on freshwater health across an entire watershed;
• have a clear purpose and provide data relevant to meeting users’ needs;
• include data of multiple types from multiple sources (e.g., academic research data, Indigenous and local knowledge, community-based monitoring data, industry data and government monitoring data)
• be readily accessible and free to use;
• present data in understandable and readily usable formats;
• provide data that is reliable and trustworthy;
• provide metadata to aid in proper interpretation and use of the data;
• provide data that are timely and regularly updated;
• be sustainable over the long-term, with adequate resources available for maintenance;
• be actively used;
• be governed by a clear and appropriate data management policy[2]; and
• be consistently evaluated to ensure its long-term performance.

Using these criteria as a guide, we assessed the quality of the open access hubs for the 23 watersheds that WWF-Canada has found to be Canada’s threatened watershed basins. Overall, we rate open access data hubs for Canada’s threatened watershed basins as medium in terms of quality.

All 23 threatened basins have:

• some form of open data access;
• support by organizations with proven track records and clear long-term commitments to monitoring;
• a mix of data types available, though government-funded scientific monitoring dominates; and
• metadata widely available and data standards established.

The geographic scope of monitoring is reasonably good, though much less monitoring is done in remote basins.

Not all open access hubs are of the same quality, however. Of the 23 threatened basins, only 11 have hubs we consider to be of high quality. Five basins (the Ottawa, Great Lakes, Okanagan-Similkameen, Columbia and Fraser-Lower Mainland basins) have high or very high WWF threat levels but rank only medium in terms of hub quality. 

Our full analysis of open access water data hubs across Canada can be found here.

[1] See here for a map of these the watersheds.

[2] See, for example, the data policy of the Mackenzie DataStream.

Last updated December 2019