Nooksack River Basin Observatory

The Nooksack River Basin HydroShare Observatory is designed to be used by individual researchers or research or classroom groups collaborating on hydrologic research in the transboundary Nooksack River Basin, State of Washington, USA and Province of British Columbia, Canada. The goal is to increase data and model discovery, computing, and publication functions provided by HydroShare. All resources available in this Collection are publicly available, and contributed by individual authors using HydroShare. The intent of this observatory is to play a cumulative role in maximizing the scientific return on individual investments of contributors conducting research in the Nooksack.

Observatories depend on collections of data and groups of people. In HydroShare, the Nooksack Observatory is a resource type called a 'Collection', and we anticipate the addition of 'Groups' when that specific software functionality is completed (expected for 2016). In short, a collection is an organization of HydroShare data, while a group is an organization of HydroShare users . Collections and Groups are designed to provide efficiency in research by enhancing individual capabilities to progress their research by sharing and using information with the group, and may be organized by geography, discipline, or research topic. If successful, this Observatory will help researchers avoid ‘reinventing the wheel’ and progressing individual and collaborative research studies using shared resources.

努克萨克河流域HydroShare天文台（Nooksack River Basin HydroShare Observatory）专为美国华盛顿州与加拿大不列颠哥伦比亚省跨界努克萨克河流域内，开展水文研究的独立研究者、研究团队或协作课堂小组设计使用。其目标在于拓展HydroShare平台所提供的数据与模型检索、计算及成果发布功能。本合集（Collection）内的所有公开资源，均由使用HydroShare平台的独立作者贡献。该天文台旨在发挥累积效应，最大化在努克萨克流域开展研究的贡献者的个体科研投入回报。
观测平台的运行依赖数据集集合与用户群体。在HydroShare平台中，努克萨克天文台属于被称为“合集（Collection）”的资源类型；我们预计当相关软件功能开发完成（预计2016年）后，将新增“用户组（Groups）”功能。简言之，合集是HydroShare数据的组织载体，而用户组则是HydroShare平台用户的组织形式。合集与用户组的设计初衷，是通过支持用户与群体间共享、复用信息，提升个体推进研究的能力，从而提升科研效率；二者可按地理区域、学科领域或研究主题进行组织。若该天文台建设成功，将帮助研究者避免“重复造轮子”，并依托共享资源推进独立研究与协作研究项目。