Local, Province & Federal/Country (Freshwater) Data Access 

For an introduction to the island's watersheds and water bodies, the CRD Watersheds of Salt Spring Island map is a good place to start.  In addition to this island watersheds overview there are variety of map (GIS) and text based query tools available for access to, and investigation of, local freshwater records and locations.  A number of these data access and visualisation tools are outlined here.  

Note - the online webmap based query tools outlined below often provide information and an elegant visual context, though are not always easy to use for "personal projects" (saving and feature import options are often limited/non-existent).  These web-maps often do not give you want you want/need in one place.  

Local - the (our) Salt Spring Island FreshWater Catalogue (SSIFWC) data and database

Details of access, to the raw and processed public field dataset, from our island's very own FreshWater Catalogue project, is available on our FWC Data Access webpage, with the recent addition of a FWC data view/visualisation now on the PacificDatastream beta site.  Our SSIFWC webmap data visualisation tool is described further below.

Province - Aquarius 

Aquarius is a freshwater-oriented province online data access system enabling viewing of data from local island data-collection stations. 

An example of how to use Aquarius to pursue the Fulford Creek data (discharge, water level, water temperature and air temperature): records from the active station - “08HA0020 - Fulford Creek near Fulford Harbour”: 

• Select the required data parameters from the drop down menu,  zoom in on the map and click on the black "Fulford Creek near Fulford Harbour" dot  to get the latest charts or tabled values. 

• The Fulford Creek data were being updating on a ca. monthly basis (though the system went down in 2021/11), so the data is not yet real-time.   NOTE the Fulford Creek station was re-instated 2023/03/30.

• Fulford does not yet have long term monitoring data which is required to develop meaningful statistics. 

• Once at least 3 complete seasons of data are available, the Fulford Creek location will be added to a province-wide "Coast Region Low Streamflow Alert" list available from FLNRO.

Province - Groundwater Wells and Aquifers 

The Groundwater Level Data Provincial Groundwater Observation Well Network provides access to the small number of actively monitored on-island wells.  Cf.  SSI Well Notes for further information on our island wells.

Province - West Coast Region Low Streamflow Reports 

• These West Coast reports contains selected streamflow and water temperature information for the West Coast Natural Resource Region (and now include information for SSI, Fulford Creek in the Fulford Creek Watershed).  Data is sourced from the Water Survey of Canada, and was analysed by the BC River Forecast Centre for the West Coast Natural Resource Region.

• Province - Drought Information Portal

• Drought is a recurrent feature of climate (change) - a deficiency of precipitation over an extended period of time, results in a water shortage. The British Columbia Drought Information Portal (DIP) is a single source geographic drought level information system for BC.

Province - Water Wells 

For those interested in the island's water wells (and their own water well records!),  there is a very useful BC province freshwater well search website.  Note - there may be some 4000+(!) wells on Salt Spring Island, ca. 1300 of these are not registered (Golder, 2019), anecdotally alot of wells are not in the registered list...

Province - Water Licences 

For those interested in the island's water resources records (and their own water records!), an interesting and very useful BC province freshwater records Water Licences website. To find "water licences users" select how you want to query the province database, to get water data records for SSI for example:

• To get all the water licences for SSI, scroll down to Saltspring Island (Sal) in the bullet labelled watershed and hit enter (do not fill in any information for the other headings)

• For a specific stream - Type in Stream Name (eg Cruse Spring), hit submit

• Choose other field search items if you know the details, hit submit

• Make a note of the file names associated with your search, eg for the Cruse Spring search example one of these is file "C107831"

• At the very bottom of the page is the "Scanned Water Licences" link, scanned licences are stored according to a Licence Number

• Click on the link for Scanned Water Licences. Using the C107831 Cruse Spring example above you will get a long list of water licence numbers starting with the letter C.

• To find Licence No. C107831 for Cruse Spring click on the scan list showing the range 107500 - 109999 on the left side of the page, you will then get the licences in this range of numbers. Scroll down until you get C107831 and then click on it.

The "Scanned Water Licences" link provides you with the issued licence information for a given location. Two links are given a "Lic tiff" (Conditional Licence) and a "tec tiff" (diagram for piping intake layout).  

It's worth persevering with the BC Water Licences Query website. There is some interesting information on freshwater sources and local usage, with the search results information explaining some of the (many) black pipes, and other creek off-takes abstracting water, from the island's streams, springs, etc.  Not all of these pipes are/need to be registered.  However, all of these freshwater abstraction sites are candidates for "casual" domestic freshwater offtake and contamination!

Salt Spring Island Watershed Protection Alliance - Technical Library

The Saltspring Island Watershed Protection Alliance (SSIWPA) online Technical Library provides links to reports on many aspects of SSI freshwater (eg ongoing well monitoring), though drilling down into this library to find stuff can be a challenge.   For more on the local island freshwater literature please have a look at our Resources, Reports webpage.

UVIC School-based Weather Station Network

A variety of weather station data types are recorded at a weather stations located at a number of SSI schools and are supported by a University of Victoria (UVIC) school weather station network.  Data downloads from this UVIC site are available for projects requiring local weatherstation data.