The Living Watershed Atlas
A public-interest atlas for Canadian watersheds. For every basin we trace the layers of authority that actually govern its water — federal, provincial, municipal, treaty, and Indigenous — and we show where duty-to-consult and free, prior, and informed consent obligations sit. Where the information exists, we publish it. Where it does not, we publish that absence.
The decisions are landing now
A water licence in a drought-affected Alberta basin. An impact assessment over a Toronto–Waterloo aquifer already near capacity. A source-water protection plan quietly amended. Each of these decisions moves through a stack of federal statutes, provincial regimes, municipal bylaws, treaty obligations, and Indigenous law — and almost nowhere can a community see that whole stack at once, let alone its deadlines.
The atlas is the translator. It takes one spatial unit — the watershed — and reads the full accountability story off it: who decides, under what authority, and by when. Portage, the atlas’s navigator, walks a community through it.
How a watershed is read
Every layer attaches to the same watershed geometry, so a reader can drill from hydrology down to a single open comment period. The Relational & Indigenous lens is not a side box — it carries equal, cross-cutting weight through every layer.
The containment unit everything else attaches to: national flow networks and nested drainage basins (National Hydro Network, WSC sub-sub-basins, HydroBASINS).
Federal statutes (Fisheries Act, CEPA, Impact Assessment Act, Canada Water Act), provincial regimes, municipal authorities, conservation authorities, and transboundary boards.
Treaty areas, unceded territory, land-claim and self-government agreements, and co-management bodies. The cross-cutting Relational & Indigenous lens lives here and reaches into every other layer.
Active permits, water licences, water-quality objectives, source-water protection plans, and impact assessments in progress — each with status, holder, and source.
Who holds the pen — decision-maker, regulator, proponent, funder. The thing most atlases omit, and the thing communities most need.
Open comment windows, registry postings, consultation deadlines. The time-sensitive layer that turns a reference map into an advocacy tool.
Two scores, never one verdict
A basin whose governance is clearly documented but whose consultation obligations go unmet reads differently from one where both are strong — and the atlas never lets one score hide behind the other. They are shown side by side, and never merged.
How clearly authority and process are documented for this watershed: can a community find the statute, the decision-maker, the instrument, and the deadline without a law firm?
Graded on the public record only. Solid bar = documented; dashed bar = opaque.
Whether duty-to-consult and FPIC obligations are being met in practice: what triggered the duty, where it sits on the Haida spectrum, and how UNDRIP / UNDA bear on it.
A missing consultation record is scored as an absence, and named as one.
The agentic layer
Portage is the act of carrying between waterways when the water runs out — literally moving across jurisdictions. It is a retrieval-grounded agent over the atlas’s own structured layers, not a free-floating chatbot: it answers only from the six-layer data model plus a curated legal and registry corpus, cites every claim back to a source row, and refuses to synthesise beyond what the layers support.
Drop a pin, get the decision-makers and the legal hook for each layer of the stack.
Live deadlines, registry postings, and comment periods surfaced from the live-process layer.
What triggered the duty, where it sits on the Haida spectrum, and how UNDRIP / UNDA and FPIC bear on it.
Statutes, permits, and technical filings rendered readable — with Indigenous-language translation on the roadmap with partners.
Baseline data, precedent decisions, and comparable submissions from other watersheds, assembled into a briefing.
Where a process is opaque or a record is missing, Portage names the absence. “Consultation record: not published” is a legitimate, valuable output.
See it in context on the pilot basin profile, where a worked “Who decides?” exchange sits alongside the governance read it draws from.
Non-negotiable
If communities contribute knowledge, OCAP® and CARE principles are structural from the first commit. Community signal is held relationally — with consent and provenance — never flattened into a cold table. Get this wrong once and no one uses the tool twice.
Community-signal records carry an explicit publish-permission flag. Nothing renders on the atlas or feeds Portage without it. No consent = counted as a gap, not shown.
Rights-holder-contributed layers are owned and toggled by the contributing nation, and do not flow into any general model by default.
Source, contributor, and permission travel with the datum — visibly. A quote without its provenance line does not appear.
Treaty and territory boundaries are published only after representation is vetted with rights-holders. Until then the layer reads “pending vetting” — an absence, honestly named.
Where this experiment stands
Open Portage vs. Confluence for the navigator, and a project title (“Living Watershed Atlas” is a placeholder). Needs Indigenous-partner input; Portage carries fur-trade connotations worth weighing.
Drafted The Smoky / Peace basin is seeded first — it mirrors a live, contested water draw. A Toronto–Waterloo aquifer watershed is the alternative for phases 1–2.
Open Which treaty and territory sources to use, and the vetting step with rights-holders before anything renders. Until resolved, the map layer stays off and says why.
Open Who signs off on the human-review step, and the exact advice-boundary disclaimer language.