Client: The St. Johns River Water Management District (SJRWMD) is responsible for managing ground and surface water supplies in all or part of 18 counties in northeast and east-central Florida.

This District’s Adaptive Management project evaluates the hydrological and biological impacts of project operation and maintenance in order to assess the best management approaches to achieve the program goals.

Challenge: The Adaptive Management project required both a massive data gathering effort and a state-of-the-art data storage and retrieval system capable of providing real-time data on the impacts of large groundwater withdrawals. A new data model was required that could both easily store and retrieve vastly disparate environmental data and also integrate with existing District databases.

Solution: Via NASA’s Space Act Agreement, Matrix teamed with Dynamac to provide IT consulting and database design, development and integration services to the SJRWMD. The innovative Environmental Integrated Model (EIM), originally developed for NASA by Matrix, was employed at SJRWMD to unify a variety of environmental and scientific metrics data and help facilitate the tracking and management of disparate District parameters. The new Adaptive Management System’s long-term monitoring, modeling and analysis capability has resulted in better-informed water management decisions.

Key Features:

• Helped implement better water resource management practices based on long-term hydrologic and environmental monitoring as well as hydrologic modeling and analysis.
• Provides easy cross-analysis of disparate datasets
• Easily integrated with existing databases
• Data is easily shared with NASA/KSC’s EIM instance
• Leveraged existing EIM unified data model saving design, development, and implementation time and costs