Designing a Web-Based Environmental Database to Manage and Monitor Environmental Programs

Abstract

The Government Performance and Results Act requires that federal agencies measure their performance by comparing the dollars they spend to the good they do. The Corps of Engineers receives funding for nine different program areas, such as flood damage reduction, navigation, and the environment. To measure its environmental performance, the Corps must identify the ways in which it improves environmental quality, define metrics that best capture these contributions numerically, collect the appropriate data, determine how much money it took to produce the contributions, and then compare the contributions to the costs. For the US Army Corps of Engineers, this requires monitoring and managing their ecological resources and remediation efforts. This desire has highlighted the need for a web based tool that provides access to spatial environmental databases and supports the Corps in performing environmental evaluations. This tool assists the Corps with the management and monitoring of national environmental investments at various geographical levels (national, regional, state and watershed) for numerous environmental outputs and their corresponding financial inputs.