Denver Water - South Water System Watershed Inventory, Analysis and Prioritization

LRE Water worked with the Denver Water Watershed Steering Committee and staff to develop a watershed inventory, assessment and prioritization for their South Collection System, which includes source water from the upper south platte, upper blue river, chatfield and bear creek.  The project is part of Denver Water’s adaptive watershed management, and involved several elements including:

• Aligning and articulating Denver Water’s organizational values on watershed health and raw water supply
• Developing a spatial inventory and associated geodatabase of watershed characteristics and risks ranging from agriculture to weather
• Defining Denver Water-specific water quality benchmarks to provide a relative comparison across the collection system
• Evaluating potential risk by compiling, processing and analyzing water quality data for over 250 monitoring locations and 40 constituents

The project culminated in the development and application of a Risk Decision Support Tool that integrates watershed values, risks and constituents to target action planning.