Researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) made significant enhancements to the HydroSource data-housing application over the past year, implementing 20 new datasets and tools to help stakeholders better understand hydropower data. Researchers published the HydroSource Data Explorer, which simplifies exploration and visualization of datasets housed in the application. ORNL also hosted a successful workshop to collect feedback on the HydroSource Data Story and published interactive visualizations on basin-scale relicensing. The HydroSource team also collaborated with the Internet of Water, a nonprofit focused on expanding access to water data, to add HydroSource to its existing archive of data hubs.

Recent enhancements to HydroSource allow various hydropower stakeholders—including researchers, developers, government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, academia, and policymakers—to make more informed decisions.

The HydroSource project, spearheaded by ORNL, is a comprehensive digital platform housing all publicly available hydropower-related datasets. The hydropower industry and decision makers can use HydroSource in a variety of ways, such as to inform policy decisions, increase transparency about hydropower projects, support analysis of hydropower operations, enable research, assess the potential for new project development, develop new tools for data-driven environmental assessment, and inform environmental permitting and mitigation.