Watershed Restoration Initiative Wins 2016 Digital Government Award

The updated Watershed Restoration Initiative (WRI) Application will be adding a Digital Government Achievement Award to its trophy case this month. WRI was one of 3 winners in the 2016 “Driving Digital Government” state government category.

The WRI application, built by a partnership between the Division of Wildlife Resources, the Dept. of Technology Services AppDev team, and AGRC, allows for collaborative project proposals, scheduling, funding, tracking, and mapping across the many participating agencies and levels of government. The WRI App integrates GIS-based digital maps extensively to organize, analyze, and visualize project information.

To date, large-scale landscape remediation and improvement projects managed in the WRI environment total almost $200 million. Participating organizations have included, at least 6 state agencies, 8 non-profits, and 5 federal agencies, plus, in some cases, private land owners.

The WRI team includes, pictured from left Steve Gourley, Scott Davis, Jase Hopkin, Jessie Pechmann, Mike Blake, Casey Wardle, Tyler Thompson, Aaron McElwee, John Angus, Chad Smith, and Nathan Kota. Other team members, not pictured, are: Kiril Boyadjieff, Mike Casey, Alan Clark, and Rose Cordova.

The DGAA award was announced by the Center for Digital Government that, in addition to its overall ‘Best of the Web’ portal awards (Utah was runner up in the portal category this year), recognized 30 websites and applications for excellence, from all levels of government.

The WRI app also recently won a Special Achievement Award in GIS from ESRI.

The ESRI award was accepted by representatives of DNR, DTS, and AGRC, at the ESRI International User Conference in June. Pictured, from left, are Nathan Kota (Senior GIS Analyst, Wildlife Resources), Bill Boudreau (IT Director, DTS-DNR), Jack Dangermond (Founder/President, ESRI), and Bert Granberg (Director, AGRC).