Innovation is a word used frequently today, often with a sense of excitement about something new and fun.  Yet in contrast, driving innovation in most organizations often seems hard and painful - impeded by a host of obstacles. Very few topics in my experience are more important to understand, why we seek innovation, how we can foster a culture of innovation, and how we can find some fun while changing institutions that resist it.  Never have the stakes been higher, as the obligations and costs of serving the public become ever higher while revenues are squeezed and in some cases reduced.  Just doing what we have always done can't work in this scenario.  We collectively must find ways to do our work in new and creative ways that improve service, and as importantly, reduce costs.  That is the role of innovation.

I will explore in this keynote the "hand over fist" of innovation.  Using my experience in more than a half dozen organizations over the last 35 years, I will outline the "Fist" of challenges that often crush innovation before it can happen.  Then I will focus on the "Hand" we can offer to overcome these obstacles and enable innovation to flourish.

Throughout I will highlight both the practical steps anyone can take to unleash the power of innovation, and the foundational importance of the right data, in the right form and at the right time, as a fundamental driver of positive change. 

I promise many fascinating examples drawn from my own experience and will leave you with a simple checklist to compare to our own work.

State agencies often serve as laboratories of innovation. Enjoy a set of brief videos that spotlight state work to improve their efforts to protect human health and the environment!

This panel will explore the vision for EPA air and water programs as they modernize their data management systems. Panelists will describe cross cutting concepts, common architectures, data integration strategies, and the connection between systems and data collection efforts.

U.S. EPA is collaborating with primacy agencies to modernize the Safe Drinking Water Information System (SDWIS) - developing the centralized cloud-hosted DW-SFTIES to replace the distributed SDWIS State software. This session will provide an overview of EPA and state workgroup efforts to support primacy agencies in transitioning to DW-SFTIES, and also feature a discussion on how primacy agencies are planning and preparing for transition.

• Will Rensmith, Windsor Solutions

This presentation will discuss the implementation of an AI chatbot pilot project by SCDES and Windsor Solutions to enhance environmental regulatory support. We will detail the process of building and training the chatbot using Microsoft Azure OpenAI Studio and its integration into an agency online permitting application. Key lessons learned and insights gained from the pilot will be shared, highlighting the potential benefits and challenges of AI in environmental regulatory services.

• Keith Benes, U.S. Department of Energy

This session will explore potential opportunities for agencies to use artificial intelligence to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of permitting processes and workflows.

Slides are unavailable for this session

Join the Exchange Network Grant Program team for a high-level look at current trends and funding priorities, as well as available resources for drafting stronger applications. Then it’s your turn to spill the tea with interactive breakout sessions to identify any current challenges and/or suggestions for improvement among current and potential grantees. The session will finish with a group discussion and opportunity to ask questions, as time allows. 

The Integrated Compliance Information System (ICIS), initially deployed in 2002, is currently used for tracking federal enforcement and compliance (FE&C) data; EPA and State, Local, and Tribal (SLT) governments Clean Air Act stationary source compliance and enforcement data; and EPA, state, and tribal Clean Water Act National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) compliance and enforcement data. To design its replacement, OECA and OMS are using an approach that relies on users’ interactions with the system and the data collected to ensure an overall positive user experience. The effort to replace ICIS is being implemented in phases to encourage continuous collaboration and iterative development improvements. The project is currently in Phase I (Definition) – which entails gathering user and functional requirements. The purpose of this session will be to share information on this project, hear feedback, and discuss collaboration efforts.

• Meta Hirschl, New Mexico Environment Department

• Angela Ollison, New Mexico Environment Department

Water system leaks have an enormous impact on communities in New Mexico. In the Summer of 2022, the Village of Chama experienced a multi-week leak that resulted in a systemwide outage during the peak summer tourism season. With the use of aerial flyovers and satellite data, contractors were able to locate the source of the leak and resolve the issue. Experience gained in that event led to the goal of developing an ongoing statewide system that can achieve similar results throughout the entire state. Hydro Delta is a first-of-its-kind project to use satellite data and Google’s Earth Engine to identify water leaks in New Mexico. In partnership with Woolpert, a leading provider of state-of-the-art geospatial services, Google Public Sector will develop a Continuous Change Detection Engine that will process satellite imagery, detect changes over time, store and index the images and corresponding anomalies, and identify the potential geographic boundaries of anomalies.

When a change is detected, NMED staff will work with New Mexico’s 1,100 water systems to investigate and repair leaking infrastructure. This session will explore the project’s challenges and opportunities. We will also discuss the many other potential areas where this platform may be useful, including methane gas detection and air quality metrics.

• Brent Cody, Momentum CE, Inc., President

Ever wonder how GIS and AI can really help you? This case study explores how the Kickapoo Tribe in Oklahoma is using web mapping applications and cutting-edge AI tools to help better manage and inform the public on contaminated sites and water quality within their jurisdiction. In this presentation, we demonstrate how to use web mapping applications to increase productivity, reduce training time, optimize content delivery, and retain institutional knowledge. We also explore ways to utilize and directly integrate AI tools like ChatGPT, OpenAI APIs, and Microsoft Copilot, focusing on their application in conversational engagement, data analysis, task automation, content generation, and grant writing. A case study of the Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma will highlight objectives in public engagement, interdepartmental data sharing, and the use of AI to streamline workflows. Finally, the presentation provides insights into building your own web mapping application, with a step-by-step guide and a discussion on no-code options for organizations looking to enhance their spatial data management capabilities.

• Inigo Peng, FlowWest, Data Scientist

• Sarah Ryan, Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians, Environmental Director

Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians and FlowWest developed a comprehensive plan for water quality management at Clear Lake, California, focusing on developing web applications to monitor domestic water supply, agricultural water use, and endangered species preservation through the Environmental Protection Agency’s Exchange Network Grants. This collaborative effort integrates the development of various web applications, tools, and solutions for water quality data management. Notable tools include the Clear Lake Water Quality Dashboard, Water Quality Exchange Network API Wrapper (wqxtools) and its R wrapper (wqxWeb), RShiny Application (bvr-wqx-uploader), and ClearLake Data Collective, which streamlines the raw lab data to WQX portal pipeline. Through APIs and customized software, these projects also helped to enhance the decision-making process, organizing and presenting a large volume of complex environmental data to the stakeholders. The tools allowed timely decision-making processes such as delivering cleaned data, analytics, and visualizations to support the ongoing effort to implement emergency regulations to protect the threatened Clear Lake Hitch, a culturally significant species to Big Valley Rancheria and ecologically crucial to Clear Lake and its tributaries. By finding an intersection between data, science, and policy through cross-partner collaboration, Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians Environmental Protection Department has laid the groundwork for a data-driven watershed-scale aquatic restoration framework through the Exchange Network Grants, enabling them to become the recognized local specialists for water quality analysis and data management in the basin.

• Brandi Easton, Oklahoma Water Resources Board, Data Manager - WATER Division

The National Aquatic Resource Survey (NARS) has led the way for decades in developing quantitative methodology for surveying varied aquatic habitats, and several states and tribes have adopted these methods into their programs. Habitat surveys designed around multi-dimensional collection methods pose data storage challenges for traditional, relational database structures, like the EPA’s Water Quality Exchange (WQX), leading to data accessibility and usability issues. Being able to analyze habitat data alongside related water quality and biological data, without having to export and combine from dissimilar storage platforms, will notably improve data accessibility and analysis. Aiming to develop a structure for habitat data to be managed in the Ambient Water Quality Monitoring System (AWQMS) and linked to WQX, a multidisciplinary team analyzed the National River and Streams Assessment (NRSA) and National Lakes Assessment (NLA) field collection methodologies and complete data flows from collection, entry, storage, and analysis. A relational data structure that seamlessly fits into both AWQMS and WQX was created for both habitat data types, as well as a data import tool to allow NRSA data to be repeatably and efficiently imported to AWQMS, with the NLA import tool in final development, and flow to WQX and the Water Quality Portal.

The Cross-Media Electronic Reporting Rule (CROMERR) provides the legal framework for electronic reporting under EPA and delegated regulatory programs. In the years since the rule's adoption, technology and practices regarding electronic reporting and signatures have matured. Agencies and programs have anecdotally identified a range of pain points associated with CROMERR implementation that may be impeding the expansion of electronic reporting.  

This panel discussion will share insights from a recent collaborative effort to identify CROMERR implementation challenges. Attendees will have an opportunity during open discussion to contribute additional challenges and share their own CROMERR implementation experiences. The outputs of this session will help set the stage for future work that will evaluate potential pathways to mitigate these implementation challenges and improve user experiences while continuing to ensure the enforceability of electronically-collected regulatory information.

• Jill Carr, MassBays National Estuary Partnership, Coastal Data Scientist

With funding from the Exchange Network, the MassBays National Estuary Partnership, in partnership with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and EPA Region 1, developed two new tools to increase the volume of quality-assured data available to decision makers. The first is AquaQAPP—an open-source, web-based application that helps community-based watershed groups generate quality assurance project plans (QAPPs) for water quality monitoring and benthic assessments in coastal and fresh waters. The second is MassWateR—a robust R-based package that provides a streamlined and repeatable means of 1) screening data for quality control, 2) preparing data and QC summary for submission to MassDEP, and 3) creating graphics for analysis and reports to stakeholders. During this presentation, the development process of the tools will be discussed along with demonstrations of their functionality. Attendees will learn new tools that can be adapted anywhere and hear lessons learned regarding government-NGO partnerships, tool development, and strategies for increasing data quantity and quality across sectors.

• Adam Griggs, USEPA Office of Water, Ecologist, Lead for Water Quality Portal

Learn more about EPA’s Water Quality Exchange (WQX) and the Water Quality Portal and the role that REST APIs play in supporting water quality data submissions, data sharing, and system interoperability.

This workshop will cover some fundamentals in how and why to develop effective data management plans.