Photo: The Centre for Community Mapping (Comap.ca) is developing models to show how the spread of pollution can lead to algae blooms similar to this one in Lake Erie in 2009.
It’s green, slimy and a monstrous problem in Ontario’s lakes and rivers.
But a local company now partnered with Communitech’s DATA.BASE program has joined the fight against algae blooms that sap waterways of oxygen and threaten other forms of aquatic life.
The Centre for Community Mapping (Comap.ca) in Waterloo works with Greenland International Consulting and conservation authorities in central Ontario to develop models of the Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay watersheds. Models can show what happens when pollutants — phosphorus from detergents, for example — spread.
“The huge issue in Lake Simcoe is phosphorus and the algae bloom it causes,” says Fred McGarry, executive director of Comap.ca. “With watershed modelling, you can run scenarios. If you have a development proposal, you can see the impact in a real-time format.”
Greenland has the modelling tools, but Comap.ca is using its own products to shift the process to the web. This makes the information easier to share and allows for overlays of the kinds of web-based information DATA.BASE wants collected and used.
Governments, companies and individuals going about their daily lives generate vast quantities of information, known as big data. These range from weather reports and ship movements, to traffic counts and shopping patterns.
Supported by a $6.4-million contribution from the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario, DATA.base seeks to extract value from that information, like iron from ore.
Challenges include processing the information once it’s collected, developing protocols for sharing it, and establishing whether the processed information is something that others might buy.
Comap.ca began in 2005 as an association between McGarry and Donald Cowan, director of the Computer Systems Group at the University of Waterloo. Comap is a non-profit company, McGarry said, “in the business of serving civil society” by creating digital tools that have social impact, and that may be monetized.
As a former land developer, McGarry had seen development proposals get mired in an approvals process that seems to generate more confrontation than collaboration. Citizens either misunderstand plans, or developers fail to appreciate the value citizens place in certain community features.
Digital mapping that not only points out topographical problems facing a project, but social and cultural challenges as well, might help.
“The potential is for developers to run scenarios before they spend a lot of money,” McGarry says. “The more agencies share data, the more useful the scenarios become.”
Comap.ca’s projects also track invasive species in Ontario and build interactive cultural maps with embedded narratives. It is working with Toronto-area First Nations groups to explore how community mapping can catalogue aboriginal heritage sites now hidden by buildings and asphalt.
Besides reliably showing how urban development and farming might impact a watershed, mapping that is steeped in data will help communities adjust to climate change, McGarry says. Models can be loaded with information about such things as snow accumulation, topography, soil cover and culvert sizes.
“The 100-year flood line is inadequate as a test,” he says. “We need to know what we’re dealing with every season.’’
McGarry sees a day when communities draw from deep pools of data to create digital atlases of themselves.
“Our role,” he says, “is to help people tell their stories.”
