As urbanization increases throughout the west, water managers are faced with the challenge of determining how much water will be needed to support their communities. Quantifying the range of potential water needs of growing urban areas is extremely important for long term planning, particularly for state and federal water resource departments. Having robust information on current development patterns and associated water use will be critical to developing targeted water conservation strategies, especially as water supply is impacted by a changing climate. However, this data can be challenging to analyze because of the multitude of agencies and organizations that collect it, some of which do not have their data accessible online.

This project will help inform water management of the Boise River Basin by integrating multiple data streams to gain a more complete understanding of the managed fluxes of water through the basin. This will include compiling state, federal and private streamflow data from canals and ditches across the basin and improving our geospatial dataset of point of use and point of diversion information. This project will assess how suburban use of irrigation water has changed the timing and variability of streamflow through the canals, and instrument six new gaging locations with local irrigation districts. These new and improved datasets and analyses will be useful for evaluating various growth scenarios in the basin and associated water supply forecasts.