As part of its ongoing Watershed Master Planning process, Anne Arundel County is developing a Watershed Management Tool (WMT) to help County staff identify necessary actions for improving degraded conditions in the Severn River watershed, and to facilitate more informed land use and development decisions by County staff and stakeholders.

The WMT will link watershed data and models to give these parties information on how changes in land use, zoning, management practices, and watershed conditions affect the Severn River and its tributaries.

The tool has four major components:

• Database Repository
• Modeling
• Management
• Visualization.

The Database Repository Component provides data storage and retrieval for all other components. Its primary sources of information are existing County databases from the Land Use Offices, detailed stream assessment information, and the information generated by the other components of the tool, such as the model scenario output.

The Modeling Component consists of a variety of individual analytical models to assess existing and future conditions in the watershed. The models assess pollutant loading, estimate soil erosion and impacts to groundwater, analyze the hydrology for land development conditions for the 1-, 2-, 10-, and 100-year storm events, determine the potential for road flooding at stream crossings, and determine the effects of land use changes on habitat indices using regression analysis.

The Management Component serves as the control interface between other WMT components. It provides workflow management, project setup/ tracking, and data integration for the WMT. This component is primarily for the WMT administrators to manage project-related tasks, and for the WMT users to control the workflow of their specific project as it relates to the defined business processes.

The Visualization Component allows WMT users to browse, query, and report data. MapOptix, an existing County tool, is the graphic and non-graphic means through which the information is provided. Users are able to view existing GIS map layers, future map layers, and model results at their desktop.