Northwest Environmental Data Base video ( 1993 )

1993 Northwest Environmental Data Base - The Rivers Information Systems of Idaho, Montana, Oregon, & Washington from Gary O. Grimm on Vimeo.
This archival 17.5 minute multimedia production was originally created by Mountain Visions in 1993 and transferred to video tape. Now we have recovered it from the archives, digitized and uploaded as a historical record of one of many similar productions we produced in the late 1980's and early 90s, before we started producing CD-ROMs and web sites.

NED was a result of the Northwest Power Planning Council started in 1980 and the Pacific Northwest River Study in 1984. More than ten years of valuable data was gathered by agencies, tribes, communities, businesses and individuals and put into this Data Base that provided detailed information about 34,000 distinct river segments in 135,000 miles of streams in the Columbia River System and four Northwest States.

Categories of Data included Anadromous Fish, Resident Fish, Wildlife, Natural Features, Cultural Resources, Recreation, Institutional Constraints, Hydrosite Data Base, River Reach File, and Protected Areas.

This outreach educational multimedia project was used in Town Hall and other meetings throughout the Northwest to describe the Data Base, GIS technology and how to use the Rivers Information Systems. These presentations encouraged and invited everyone to use NED and to continue to participate in its future development.

The data contained in NED still exists in various data bases and has been improved over the years. I believe that the current trend toward Open.Gov, making data more available to the public and inviting participation in gathering and analyzing data, and being more involved in decision making is the wave of the future, promised by NED even in 1993.