Albemarle Ground Water Assessment Project

Principal Investigator: Garrick E. Louis
Project Executive Director: Jeffrey W. Rogers

Goal 1
Create a model for groundwater (GW) resource assessment that can be used by government agencies and the public to facilitate planning for sustainable development that affects rural areas.
Goal 2
Promote widespread use of the validated model by public planning agencies, community residents, and other stakeholders involved in the development of rural areas.

OBJECTIVES TO ACHIEVE GOAL 1:

Develop and apply GW assessment techniques to characterize the groundwater system of the Ivy subdivision of Western Albemarle County, as a model of GW assessment and use in other communities.
Develop a model for collecting, storing, retrieving, analyzing, and displaying GW assessment information that documents trends in the availability and consumption of the resource, and is useful to County officials and the public in planning for development.
Develop a model that is effective in getting County planners, water officials and the public to use the GW assessment information in the decision-making process for development that affects rural areas.

OBJECTIVES TO ACHIEVE GOAL 2:

Determine the state of use of GW resource assessment for development planning by regional planning agencies nationwide.
Document best practices in the use of GW assessments for regional development planning.
Modify and test these best practices in the Ivy case study.
Broadly disseminate the results of this work.

Current methods for sampling and testing water from groundwater wells are both inefficient and expensive. Typically, the person that collects the sample also determines the geographical coordinates using a portable global positioning system (GPS) unit and then brings the sample to a lab where the desired tests are done. To illustrate how expensive and time-intensive lab tests are, in the 2000 Shipman Water Project, each test lasted for about a week and cost $100 per sample. In comparison, the Capstone Team’s water sampling kit consists of probes for each pollutant of concern, a laptop (with a USB connection to the probes), and a GPS unit. All the tests can be done onsite and the results directly recorded onto a spreadsheet. The initial equipment cost of about $600 was easily recovered because of minimal operational expenses. Moreover, this test kit will save a lot of time and effort and actually, has the potential to set a new standard for sampling water. A new law may actually require homeowners to test the quality of their well water and consequently, will boost the market for this test kit.

Geographic information system (GIS) is a computer system capable of capturing, storing, analyzing, and displaying geographically referenced information; that is, data identified according to location. The web-based GIS maps that were and continuously being developed using ImageMapperTM, allows user interaction. Users can perform simple operations such as zooming in & out, querying a specific property, choosing the layers to be displayed, and checking the data associated to a particular well.