In the Ottawa River watershed there are conservation authorities. They are present on the Ontario side, but they are not consistent across that side, because it is up to the municipalities to decide whether they're going to fund conservation authorities or not.
In the northern part of the watershed where we have a large agricultural belt around Lake Timiskaming there is no conversation authority, so there is no drought forecasting done in that region. Then on the other side of the river, we have the organismes de bassins versants, which are OBVs for short, which do a lot of research on it, but they don't have similar funding, and they don't have the same powers that conservation authorities have.
I think when looking at these models, even within the models themselves there are some discrepancies about how effective they can be when they are not applied throughout the entire watershed or regions that they are looking at.
In addition to that, with the data availability and the lack of consistent data being collected, it's very difficult to do analysis if you're not collecting data consistently from year to year. We have, within an Ottawa River watershed report we did, this concept of a slipping baseline—the fact that you collect data at a certain time, and if it doesn't exist previously, we have to look at the conditions today as opposed to what they looked like 30 years ago, which would give us a sense of the impacts of climate change and pollution. Therefore that all stems back to this: What are the stresses on the aquatic health of these rivers, and how do we move forward to protect them?
I think it's an excellent observation, and there are some really good models out there. However, of course, we are a watershed organization, and I would really strongly advocate to consider the value of community-based monitoring and citizen and community scientists, who can help gather that data and provide that localized knowledge that is so critical to understanding what might be happening. We can take the time to analyze the data at a watershed scale and provide that feedback, which is not necessarily done just when data is collected.