The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) recently launched an innovative online portal that makes a broad range of the Commonwealth’s environmental data accessible to stakeholders in an easy-to-use, interactive format. With a special focus on geospatial data and applications, the Virginia Environmental Data Hub incorporates spatial and nonspatial data from DEQ’s ArcGIS Servers, data stores, web services, ArcGIS Online, and interactive applications using Esri’s Hub site hosting technologies.
The “hub” is actually just a single component of a triad of geospatial web utilities offered by DEQ, serving as the landing site to access Virginia’s Open Data portal (which contains the raw data for download) and Environmental Data Mapper (home to the Commonwealth’s interactive web mapping tools in the form of Story Maps, Web Maps, and web mapping applications, as well as GIS and data updates from DEQ.) The Environmental Data Mapper tool provides numerous options to customize the user’s visualization of environmental data, including dozens of DEQ data layers related to biosolids, pollution respons, renewable energy, hydrology, and water quality.
On its visually engaging homepage, the portal site currently features an informative story map about DEQ’s citizen-nominated water quality follow-up monitoring efforts, as well as a review of the agency’s current GIS initiatives & priorities, which include deployment of new mapping tools and enhanced public outreach, transparency, and access to geospatial data and resources.
