Summary: Many decisions in a watershed or a river/lake basin are hampered by availability of adequate information. For example, which are the erosion hotspots in a watershed? What is the flow at various points in a basin? Which areas are susceptible to floods and droughts? What impact do upstream landuse changes or future climate scenarios have on its hydrology? Answering these questions requires access to a range of multi-sectoral data that impacts multi-sectoral decisions in the basin context. This webinar will set the watershed context for making decisions at different scales, illustrate what types of data are useful to help make such decisions, and overview of public-domain data (from in-situ and earth observation) curated by many organizations. In particular, the session will introduce new opportunities for bottom-up (in-situ) monitoring with new sensors, and explore a rapidly expanding range of earth observation data products that are now accessible in the public domain. A new innovative free World Bank App called Spatial Agent will be presented along with its associated learning resources on OLC. This will demonstrate the powerful visualization of thousands of relevant (mostly global) data services provided by NASA, ESA, The World Bank, UN organizations, Universities, and other institutions around the world. At the end of this webinar, we expect that the participants can gain a good appreciation of why spatial information is useful in a watershed/basin context, and be able to use the Spatial Agent App. It will also introduce the Watershed Moments webinar series.
