Canada Water Act annual report for 2019 to 2020: chapter 9

9 Water data online

The Government of Canada’s Water website provides content on ECCC’s water-related activities and program areas as well as general information on a wide range of water-related topics and the full text of key water publications (such as the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River water levels). In addition, the site provides links to laws and regulations.

ECCC’s Wateroffice website provides public access to real-time and archived hydrometric data collected in Canada. In 2019-2020, the website received over 89 million hits and nearly 2.5 million visits.

ECCC’s Meteorological Services of Canada Datamart provides access to weather, climate and water data as static files using open file formats. In 2019-2020, the hydrometric folder on ECCC’s datamart received nearly 167 million hits with 11.61 Terabytes of data downloaded.

Federal Water Quality Monitoring and Surveillance data is available through various mechanisms:

1. Freshwater quality data collections on the Government of Canada Open Data Portal:
   • National scope
     • National Long-term Water Quality Monitoring Data
     • Automated Fresh Water Quality Monitoring and Surveillance Data
     • CABIN Canadian Aquatic Biomonitoring Network
   • Regional scope
     • Great Lakes Water Quality Monitoring and Aquatic Ecosystem Health Data
     • Surface Water Quality and Benthic Invertebrates, Oil Sands Region
     • Freshwater Quality Surveillance Data – Pacific Basin
     • Field data for the mapping of wetlands of the St. Lawrence River between Cornwall and Trois-Pistoles, of the Lake St. Pierre wetlands and of the Boucherville Islands area.
     • Clean Air Regulatory Agenda Freshwater Inventory and Surveillance of Mercury (CARA FISHg)
     • Great Lakes Fish Contaminants Monitoring and Surveillance Data

   Water Quality Monitoring and Surveillance datasets were download over 8200 times from the Government of Canada Open Data Portal from April 2019 to March 2020.

2. Two internal interactive websites allow search and extraction of freshwater quality monitoring and surveillance regional data that can easily be shared as required:

   • Envirodat-PYR Web data extraction – provides data for the Pacific and Yukon watershed.
   • Fresh Water Quality Monitoring and Surveillance web mapping – provides data for the Great-Lakes, St. Lawrence and Atlantic watersheds.

3. The Gordon Foundation’s DataStream integrates federal datasets with community based water quality monitoring data. ECCC has provided technical advice and expertise (with respect to water quality data) to support the expansion of and improvements in the platforms for Lake Winnipeg DataStream, Mackenzie DataStream and Atlantic DataStream.