Url https://wou.omeka.net/s/repository/item/4732 Title Changes in the Willamette Valley: The Creation of a Preliminary GIS of Oregon's River Water Quality Creator Aaron Orr Subject Willamette Valley GIS Oregon River Water Water Quality Date 6/1/2018 Type Text Honors Thesis Identifier honors_theses/152 Language eng Rights Western Oregon University Library has determined, as of 06/01/2023, this item is in copyright, which is held by the author. Users may use the item in accordance with copyright limitations and exceptions, including fair use. For other uses, please ask permission from the author. http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ Abstract The current system for rating river quality by the Department of Environmental Quality is the Oregon Water Quality Index (OWQI), which condenses key issues down to a number for simple review and analysis. This breakdown provides an easily identifiable and comparable rating for any observed river. However, in oversimplifying the health of streams, this index score falls short in the task of capturing hydrologic systems as dynamic systems in terms of river health. With GIS, all of the components that go into the OWQI can be displayed, both validating the index scores each river is given and providing a map that allows users to actively track the state of each river on an annual temporal scale. Department or school name within institution Honors Program Note Melinda Shimizu Gavin Keulks --