Introduction

The launching of the Owasco Watershed Network (OWN) is the result of the work of many people determined to harness the power of new and varied information technologies to serve a single purpose, the long term protection of Owasco Lake. If the term ”traditional” can rationally be applied to such technologies then on the surface at least it can be seen as a traditional web portal. It is the presentation of information and material from various sources in a unified way through the use of a website. Thus it could be expected to contain links to other websites representing many organizations and individuals who also present data and information useful to the protection of Owasco Lake. There is no surprise here; this portal does that, with links to the work of many groups and individuals from the Owasco Watershed Association (OWL) to the Finger Lakes Institute (FLI) and including at its release more than 30 links to organizations doing critical work. But why create such a portal in the first place?

Purpose

The vision for the portal can be seen as a metaphor representing the ecology of the lake. The lake rests as the receiving body of water for a land area that is almost 20 times the size of the lake area. 205 square miles of land area drain to the lake, which has a surface area of only 10.3 square miles. What happens to the water as it moves toward the lake across this vast watershed is what happens to the lake. How this land is managed therefore has direct and compelling impact on the condition of the lake.

Making things even more interesting is the supposition that the lake is also similarly impacted by groundwater resources that also move water to the lake and the potential for these ground water systems to be influenced in turn by recharge areas that may not even be in the watershed at all. An enormously varied and complex ecology has evolved within these areas and it has real if not completely understood impacts on the condition of the lake.

Additional impacts come directly from the condition of the rain and snow, the precipitation that falls directly from the sky into the body of water. The same ratios that increase the influence of runoff and groundwater on the lake decrease the relative influence of direct precipitation. There simply isn’t that much surface area to catch such precipitation in comparison to the surface area of the watershed.

Thus we can see “OWN” as a metaphor to this basic ecology. OWN is a portal that connects widely varied information and data of interest, importance, and influence to the protection of the lake. Like the rain that falls on the watershed and is carried into the lake via its many tributaries, some of this information is of obvious importance. But like an individual decision to apply fertilizer to a small field already saturated with rain or to remove vegetation from a few hundred yards of road side ditching several miles from the shoreline, the significance of some of the information will be less clear.