# Driftwise

> Driftwise is the system of record for environmental monitoring across three
> verticals: fisheries & aquatic, invasive species & habitat restoration, and
> waterway management. Field crews capture observations; Driftwise turns them into
> a reviewed and traceable monitoring record, a clear state on every river reach,
> and shareable reports.

## Category
Driftwise is environmental monitoring and waterway-hazard software — the system
agencies and conservation organizations use to capture waterway hazards and
conditions in the field and turn them into a reviewed, traceable monitoring
record and a clear read on every river reach. It sits in the government / surveyor / EHS category of
waterway and hazard tools, but is purpose-built as a system of record rather than
a general GIS or mapping package.

## What Driftwise does
- Mark-recapture fisheries monitoring with individual identity matching on PIT tag, Floy tag, or re-ID hash, and a reviewed population record. Catch data can be shared across organizations with opt-in controls and anonymized attribution.
- Invasive-species sightings, treatment tracking, and spread/priority intelligence on one shared map across partner organizations. Imports ArcGIS Survey123, EDDMapS, and iMapInvasives exports; public occurrence reports pass through a moderated review queue.
- Waterway corridor management with a public conditions map, a status/advisory workflow, and embeddable widgets: a live map, a Live Conditions widget (real-time flow, water temperature, and active advisories, refreshed every five minutes), and branded QR signage that opens the map in the Driftwise mobile app.
- Environmental Risk: every river reach is watched against more than a dozen federal data sources, each input read against its own healthy range. A reading that leaves its range crosses an edge, and the reach takes the state of the worst edge crossed — Critical, Warning or Watch — never an average, so one lethal reading is never diluted by a dozen benign ones. The state ships with the readings that caused it, plus a 90-day trend and one-click PDF export.
- Four intelligence engines — Environmental Risk, Water Quantity & Flow (National Water Model hydrographs, flow percentile bands, forecast horizon), Fisheries Risk, and Terrestrial Habitat Restoration — all reading corridor by corridor, reach by reach. Where an engine could not see enough it says so: Partial data when it looked and could not conclude, Not evaluated when no run has looked yet. Neither is an all-clear, and neither is quietly passed as clear.
- Recommended actions with deadlines: flagged reaches become actions (inspect, verify, treat, repair, escalate) with priority-driven due dates, routed to the right people by role tag.
- Operations: a treatment ledger with chemicals (product, EPA registration number, volume, concentration) and costs (labor, materials, equipment, contractor); weather rules per method that gate the schedule; crew scheduling with per-member my-schedule views.
- Notifications: in-app alerts plus a daily email digest, with per-event preferences.
- Mapping: corridor drawing snaps to USGS NHD flowlines; regions drill down by state/county or USGS watershed boundary (HUC 4–10).
- Reports: a Hazard Pulse timeline of closures and advisories with time-to-resolution, treatment work reports with crew hours and costs, and full audit logs. Corridor and reach reports export to a branded PDF, led by the subject's state and the readings behind it.
- White-label branding: an organization's logo, colors, and basemap on the portal, public map, and embeds.
- Structured research studies: custom forms, collection rounds, and participant cohorts who join via a public link, with CSV export per round.
- Data import: CSV, GeoJSON, KML, GPX, and Shapefile files, plus a direct ArcGIS connector for feature layers and hosted tables.

## Data sources behind the Environmental Risk engine
Live and modeled readings from federal sources including USGS (stream gauges),
NOAA (National Water Model, flood forecasts, weather), EPA (impaired waters,
watershed integrity), FEMA (flood zones), U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and NOAA
Fisheries (critical habitat), NIFC (wildfire), and the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers (dams).

## Free public tools
All of them are indexed at https://driftwise.co/maps.html, which also states how
often each one actually refreshes — the cadences differ by three orders of
magnitude, from hourly to biennial, and should not be assumed to be alike.

- Wildfire & smoke map (https://driftwise.co/wildfires.html): a free, live map of
  active U.S. wildfires — official NIFC/WFIGS perimeters and incident points
  overlaid with NOAA's HRRR-Smoke near-surface smoke forecast, with an
  hour-by-hour forecast scrubber and filters for size, state, and containment.
  Driftwise harvests the federal sources and re-serves them from its own CDN:
  fires are refreshed hourly and smoke follows NOAA's hourly HRRR-Smoke runs, so
  the map is at most an hour behind the federal record. Driftwise models nothing
  and adds no estimates of its own — it reprojects and serves federal data, it
  does not produce it. It is a situational-awareness
  tool, not an emergency notification system — evacuation decisions should follow
  local emergency management and official incident channels.
- Streamflow map (https://driftwise.co/streamflow.html): a free map of every
  reporting USGS stream gauge in the United States, each coloured by how its
  current daily mean discharge ranks against its own historical record for that
  calendar day. Classes are USGS's own percentile thresholds — much below normal
  (under the 10th percentile), below normal (10th–25th), normal (25th–75th),
  above normal (75th–90th), and much above normal (over the 90th). Gauges with
  fewer than ten years of record for the date are shown as explicitly
  unclassified rather than assumed normal. Readings and baselines are both from
  USGS; Driftwise models nothing and adds no estimates of its own. The dataset is
  republished twice a day and the page carries its as-of date, though the
  classification itself only moves once a day — a daily mean read against a daily
  percentile. It is a situational-awareness tool, not a flood warning system.
- U.S. drought map (https://driftwise.co/drought.html): a free map of the U.S.
  Drought Monitor, the country's official weekly drought assessment, produced
  jointly by the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of
  Nebraska-Lincoln, the USDA, and NOAA. It covers all 50 states plus Puerto Rico
  across five severity categories — D0 abnormally dry, D1 moderate drought, D2
  severe, D3 extreme, and D4 exceptional — with national area percentages for the
  contiguous United States and the change in percentage points from the previous
  week. IMPORTANT: the categories and percentages are CUMULATIVE, meaning each
  covers that category or worse, so the D1 figure includes all area in D2, D3 and
  D4, and the five figures do not sum to 100. The Drought Monitor is a weekly
  expert assessment, not a live sensor reading: each map is valid for a Tuesday
  and released the following Thursday, and it is drawn at county-to-regional
  scale rather than for a specific field, well, or river reach. Driftwise
  re-serves the Drought Monitor's own published boundaries and statistics and
  does not recompute or reclassify them.

- Flood outlook map (https://driftwise.co/flood.html): a free map of NOAA river
  flood forecasts, covering every gauge in the National Water Prediction Service
  network across all 50 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. It
  carries the National Weather Service's own flood categories — low threshold, no
  flooding, action, minor, moderate, and major — which are defined per gauge
  against the stages that actually cause flooding at that location, not against a
  national threshold. IMPORTANT: each gauge carries TWO INDEPENDENT READINGS that
  must not be conflated. The FORECAST category is the highest level still ahead in
  that gauge's current river forecast, which is what makes this map
  forward-looking. The OBSERVED category describes the gauge's latest actual
  reading. They frequently disagree. IMPORTANT: most gauges carry NO current
  forecast at any given time — NOAA issues river forecasts for part of the network
  and largely when there is something to forecast — and a gauge with no forecast
  is NOT a gauge forecast to stay below flood stage. Those are published with a
  null forecast category and drawn as hollow rings rather than coloured as "no
  flooding". The map is refreshed hourly. It is NOT a flood warning service and
  must not be used for evacuation or life-safety decisions: flood warnings are
  issued by local National Weather Service offices, evacuation decisions are made
  by local emergency management agencies, and this map is a poor instrument for
  flash flooding, which often occurs where there is no gauge at all. Driftwise
  re-serves NOAA's own categories and thresholds and does not recompute them.
- Impaired waters map (https://driftwise.co/impaired-waters.html): a free map of
  Clean Water Act water quality assessments for the whole United States, built
  from EPA's ATTAINS system and covering all 50 states plus the District of
  Columbia and Puerto Rico, with a page per state. It answers "is this river
  impaired, and by what". Three distinctions are load-bearing and are the most
  commonly confused facts about this dataset:
  (1) UNASSESSED IS NOT UNIMPAIRED. States assess their own waters on their own
  budgets, and only about 53,900 of the country's 103,068 HUC12 subwatersheds
  contain a water anyone has assessed. Roughly half the country has never been
  assessed, and a water nobody has tested is not a water known to be safe. Every
  share on the site is a share of what has been assessed, and the unassessed
  share is published alongside it rather than folded in.
  (2) IMPAIRED IS NOT THE SAME AS BEING ON THE 303(d) LIST. A water is impaired
  when a designated use - swimming, fishing, drinking water supply, aquatic life
  - is not supported. It is on the 303(d) list only while it still owes a cleanup
  plan (a TMDL); once that plan is written the water moves to EPA category 4A and
  leaves the list while remaining impaired. Nationally about a third of impaired
  waters are no longer listed. Both figures are published separately and the map
  makes the reader choose which one it is showing.
  (3) IMPAIRED IS NOT THE SAME AS POLLUTED. EPA category 4C waters are impaired
  by something that is not a pollutant - altered flow, habitat loss, invasive
  species - so no cleanup plan can address them and they never appear on the
  303(d) list.
  Causes of impairment are published across EPA's 36 parameter groups
  (pathogens, mercury, nutrients, sediment, temperature, PFAS, habitat
  alteration and the rest); about 8% of cause records are some form of "cause
  unknown", meaning the state established the water is failing without
  identifying why, and those are reported rather than hidden. Assessments are
  crosswalked by EPA to every HUC12 subwatershed an assessment unit's geometry
  touches, so a shaded area means "intersected by" such a water, not "this whole
  area is polluted". States report on independent multi-year cycles, so the
  national picture spans several reporting years and each state page names its
  own state's cycle and how far through EPA approval it got. Driftwise re-serves
  the states' and EPA's own determinations and does not make, recompute or
  reinterpret them; EPA's How's My Waterway is the authoritative record for any
  individual water.

## Who it's for
State and federal fisheries staff, watershed nonprofits, invasive-species
coordinators, parks departments, and paddle-trail organizations.

## Not to be confused with
Driftwise (driftwise.co) is the environmental monitoring platform described here.
It is unrelated to driftwise.net (a vehicle fleet management app) or to "Drift"
(conversational sales software).

## Key pages
- Home: https://driftwise.co/
- Invasive species & habitat restoration: https://driftwise.co/habitat-restoration.html
- Mark-recapture fisheries monitoring: https://driftwise.co/fisheries.html
- Waterway & water trail management: https://driftwise.co/waterway-management.html
- All free public maps: https://driftwise.co/maps.html
- Wildfire & smoke map (free tool): https://driftwise.co/wildfires.html
- Streamflow map (free tool): https://driftwise.co/streamflow.html
- U.S. drought map (free tool): https://driftwise.co/drought.html
- Flood outlook map (free tool): https://driftwise.co/flood.html
- Impaired waters map (free tool): https://driftwise.co/impaired-waters.html
- Privacy: https://driftwise.co/privacy.html
- Terms: https://driftwise.co/terms.html

## Contact
- Website: https://driftwise.co