To support the Department’s ongoing water rights claim adjudication process in the Snake River Basin, Spatial Dynamics is conducting a multi-year project to map water rights claims. The work involves development of ArcView shapefiles depicting individual water rights claims using interactive screen digitizing of map-registered aerial photography, public land survey GCDB data, and USGS DLG data for roads, streams, water bodies, and other features, in conjunction with historic water rights files. The claim mapping process involves delineating claimed irrigation areas, measuring the amount of land irrigated, and comparing this data to the water rights claim and the water right point of diversion. Printed and digital maps are prepared for each claim. The claims and mapping data are then combined in the supporting shapefile tables, producing a GIS database of all water rights claims for a particular water management basin.

Spatial Dynamics used Avenue to develop a series of automated ArcView applications to support consistent and accurate processing of claims data. When complete, the project will have addressed as many as 15,000 water rights claims. An example of the on-screen shapefile preparation is shown below.