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Hydrologic Information Systems (HIS) have emerged as a means to organize, share, and synthesize water data. This work extends current HIS capabilities by providing additional capacity and flexibility for marine physical and chemical observations data and for freshwater and marine biological observations data. These goals are accomplished in two broad and disparate case studies – an HIS implementation for the oceanographic domain as applied to the offshore environment of the Chukchi Sea, a region of the Alaskan Arctic, and a separate HIS implementation for the aquatic biology and environmental flows domains as applied to Texas rivers. These case studies led to the development of a new four-dimensional data cube to accommodate biological observations data with axes of space, time, species, and trait, a new data model for biological observations, an expanded ontology and data dictionary for biological taxa and traits, and an expanded chain-of-custody approach for improved data source tracking. A large number of small studies across a wide range of disciplines comprise the “Long Tail” of science. This work builds upon the successes of the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) by applying HIS technologies to two new Long Tail disciplines: aquatic biology and oceanography. In this regard this research improves our understanding of how to deal with collections of biological data stored alongside sensor-based physical data. Based on the results of these case studies, a common framework for water information management for terrestrial and marine systems has emerged which consists of Hydrologic Information Systems for observations data, Geographic Information Systems for geographic data, and Digital Libraries for documents and other digital assets. It is envisioned that the next generation of HIS will be comprised of these three components and will thus actually be a Water Information System of Systems.

There is a recent trend in the United States toward considering, protecting, and restoring environmental (or instream) flows in river systems. A current challenge is the development of methods to quantitatively establish environmental flow needs based on an understanding of the linkages between flow and biota and the development of integrated, multidisciplinary stream classification systems as a means to extrapolate results from reach-scale studies. An assessment of hydrologic alteration tools was performed along with the characterization of the flow regime at select gages and an evaluation of spatial and temporal patterns in hydrology and hydroclimatology within and between basins in Texas. In addition, an integrated stream classification system was developed and tested for Texas based on quantitative data for 18 distinguishing parameters encompassing watershed and stream channel processes and functions from four disciplines: (1) Hydrology & Hydraulics, (2) Water Quality, (3) Geomorphology & Physical Processes, and (4) Climatology. The State of Texas was partitioned into five regions: East Texas, South-Central Texas, Lower Rio Grande Basin, West Texas, and North-Central Texas by 8-digit Hydrologic Unit Code (HUC) basins.