Institute of Water Research

Project Summary

Water quality improvements can take time to demonstrate after implementation of conservation practices. Confirming that awareness and attitudes are changing, and behaviors are being adopted in a watershed, is one way that projects can demonstrate progress toward water quality goals. Social indicators provide consistent measures of social change within a watershed and can be used by managers at local, state, and federal levels to estimate the impacts of their efforts and resource investments. Social metrics provide a key opportunity for assessing whether existing efforts are building collaboration and how to leverage early adopters and can help track advancement of watershed implementation. The SIDMA tool organizes, analyzes, and visualizes social indicators related to NPS management efforts through statistical relationships. SIDMA social metrics provide an approach for demonstrating statistically significant shifts in attitudes, knowledge, or constraints toward adopting best management practices.

Even though SIDMA was launched in 2008, it continues to attract new users and build social indicator surveys them. This update will allow users to benefit from aesthetic changes to make its interface more modern and accessible. Specifically, a data-input function will be added to SIDMA to allow users to upload a spreadsheet of survey results, which the system will then parse and map to its existing survey structure, making it easier and faster for groups with external data to quantify social indicators. Additionally, SIDMA will receive a front-end update to give it a more modern interface and menus, and survey generation and survey input tools similar to those modern users are already familiar with. Ultimately these updates will help improve water quality and reduced nonpoint source pollutant loads to waterbodies resulting from more effective targeting and program activities.