Integrating data within watershed management and public health

Although scholars have long drawn attention to the profound social, political and security implications created by changes in water supply, quality, and access [1,2] in many parts of the world (and particularly Western Canada, where the author currently sits) both the public and policy-makers have historically considered water from the standpoint of perpetual abundance, availability, and quality [3].However, as very recent events have demonstrated along the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains have shown, that myth is increasingly, and quickly, dispelled.Many areas of the world are now intimately aware of the immediate effects of anthropogenic climate change, and much of Alberta (for example) is already anticipating severe drought conditions in the summer of 2024, if not already experiencing them.Beyond the key questions of both water supply and demand that tend to permeate political and policy discussions at both the very local, and very global, levels, water is also a natural resource that provides critical linkages and connections to, and between, ecosystems, human populations, and the activities that take place within our catchments.As a result, while we are inherently aware of the need for water once we don't have it, we are also increasingly aware of how water is a critical input for life (the water resource strategy in the Province of Alberta is actually called "Water for Life") in ways that extend beyond biological functionality, and into the linkages between community development, economic growth or depression, resource extraction, urban planning and design, of recreation, and of course, into questions of ecological, social, political and particularly health equity.Water has been a critical element for public health since the "Great Sanitary Awakening" of the 19 th Century [4], and that new emphasis corresponded to a significant change in the way that society thought about cleanliness (including clean drinking water and waste water systems) as a key factor in physical health.When coupled with industrialization, urbanization, crowded living conditions, high levels of population density and socio-economic inequities, the provision of clean water and the necessary infrastructural growth was a major factor in the evolution of public health, and in the realization that issues such as poverty and mental health were not simply individual failings.Recent years have seen a body of scholars, often working in concert with watershed management and public health practitioners, examine and expand both the data that inform practitioner-knowledge, and the socio-political norms and values that inform both data collection and its use.In addition to the analyses of different ways that public health, health equity and natural resource management can align and trigger both positive feedback for knowledge and practice, as well as potentially negative or attenuating feedback for both ecological and social effects, work in the last few decades has identified watersheds as: (1) a viable, if not desirable setting for public health [5]; (2) a functional variable that can facilitate the integration of health