DAM BUILDING and dump design. Corn harvesting and crop spraying. Snow removal and solar heating. There is scarcely a story in any Illinois newspaper which does not have what the bureaucrats, with their accustomed lack of poetry, call a natural resources component.

Making natural resources decisions in Illinois has created what Stanley Changnon — a man who, as chief of the Illinois State Water Survey, has to make more natural resources decisions than most — has called "an urgent demand for facts."

Facts are something Illinois has in abundance. Its various agencies (including its universities and its three scientific surveys) and their federal counterparts have been measuring, recording and testing the state's air, land and water and the things residing in and on it for as long as a century in some cases. The Water Survey, for instance, has amassed 10 million daily weather observations and 90,000 months of stream flow data. The Illinois State Geological Survey has perhaps as many as 15 million numbers in its 250,000 well records. And the Illinois State Natural History Survey's collection of plants alone adds up to 160,000 specimens.

Accessing data

"No other state," insists Changnon, "has a comparable combination of resource fact-finding and regular intensive study by qualified researchers of such a broad range of biological, agricultural, mineral, hydrological and atmospheric resources." However, a fact unused is nearly as useless as a fact unknown. In fiscal 1982, for example, the Water Survey staff answered nearly 15,000 requests for what the survey calls "specific problem-oriented information" — where to dig a well, how wet it got in Lockport last year. But the system by which such requests are handled is necessarily inefficient. Only parts of the survey's data files have been transcribed into computerized form. Yet for all its crudities the Water Survey's data system is more useful than most. Data are everywhere; information — data shaped to a particular purpose — is hard to find.

Faced with what might be called a specific information-oriented problem, the surveys' staffs have devised an ingenious system to "access" this data. The Illinois Climate Assessment System or CAS is a two-year demonstration project funded jointly by the Water and Natural History surveys, the Illinois Department of Energy and Natural Resources (DENR) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The CAS will provide constantly updated "real time" information on weather and weather-related phenomena via computer terminals to the statewide network of county agricultural extension agents, a dozen key federal and state agencies and selected agribusinesses.

As envisioned by Changnon and his colleagues, the CAS will work like this: A computer based in Urbana will provide data storage and processing ability. Every day that computer will be fed data on current weather conditions around Illinois. Some of this data will come from NOAA's existing network of 22 agricultural weather observers who feed their reports by telephone into NOAA's computer at Purdue University. The CAS project will add another 25 to 30 volunteer observers; in addition, sometime in 1983 or 1984 the U.S. Weather Service is expected to add another dozen or so observers in Illinois whose reports will also be available to the CAS system. The result will be a network of 60 to 70 observers across the state.

The CAS also will have access to NOAA's Climate Analysis Center and its own line of climate "products" such as weekly crop weather bulletins.

Data are everywhere; information — data shaped to a particular purpose — is hard to find

Those products are now available only by mail; mail-time data and real-time data, alas, are not the same thing. In fact, one of the reasons NOAA under-wrote part of CAS costs was so it could monitor how its own climate products were being used and by whom.

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The gush of numbers flowing into the CAS computer will be tabulated weekly, to supply seasonal or annual cumulative totals for precipitation and cooling and heating degree days for any of the state's 20 distinct climate regions. By integrating present data with the Water Survey's vast library of historical weather data, the CAS will be able to compare current values with normal values established over decades, which in turn makes it possible to compute conditional probabilities for rainfall or heat waves or cold snaps during subsequent weeks, months or seasons.

William H. Luckmann (left) is head of the Illinois Natural History Survey's economic entomology section. Stanley A. Changnon Jr. (right) is head of the Department of Energy and Natural Resources' State Water Survey.

To the typical urban Illinoisan whose range of policy options seldom extends beyond whether or not to take an umbrella to work, having access to updated rainfall data may seem merely convenient. But to storm sewer system engineers, for example, or reservoir managers, having quick access to rainfall odds or cumulative seasonal precipitation totals is convenience on a rather more substantial scale.

Exploiting knowledge

The biggest users of the CAS are expected to be farmers. Their dependence on the weather is obvious in general terms, but the relationship is subtle in its details. Fertilizer is a case in point. Big corn yields demand big applications of nitrogen fertilizer. Such fertilizer may be applied in different forms, however, and in different seasons. Spring-applied nitrogen has been found to be more efficient in dry years, while in wet years side-dressing nitrogen (applying it between plant rows) is more efficient. Knowing whether a given growing season is likely to be wet or dry in advance can help a farmer stretch his fertilizer farther.

Herbicide applications present similar choices. Controlling weeds efficiently demands that farmers (quoting the standard Cooperative Extension Service handbook) "try to make more accurate and timely applications" of chemicals. For example, preemergent herbicides require rainfall to carry them into the subsoil layers where weed seeds lurk. Accurate and timely applications mean knowing more about when and where it may rain.

Certain insects are like weeds with wings. Applications of pesticides are often haphazard, doing as much damage to the farmer's profit margins as they do to insect pests. More sophisticated pest control methods using selective chemical applications in conjunction with such nonchemical control techniques as crop rotation are cheaper.

But more sophisticated methods require more sophisticated information.

Most of the predictive products which will issue from the CAS when it goes on-line in mid-year are derived from historical data in fairly straight-forward ways. For example, if this April were wet and cold, and three of the last 10 such Aprils were followed by dry, warm Mays, then one may assume there is a 30 percent chance that this May will be dry and warm also — what Changnon describes as "big number-crunching exercises." In short, CAS will be able to correlate its constant inflow of information with ingenious new computer models to predict crop pest outbreaks.

William Luckmann is the head of the economic entomology section of the Illinois State Natural History Survey in Urbana. Explains Luckmann, "Pests like the black cutworm and the European corn borer [which attack corn], the bean leaf beetle [which attacks soybeans], and the alfalfa weevil are driven by climate, especially temperature." The black cutworm is a case in point. The larvae of the black cutworm moth hatch less according to the calendar than to the thermometer. Once enticed from their eggs by warm spring temperatures, the larvae begin feeding, usually on early weeds. (The moth parents lay their eggs near just such a food supply.) Unfortunately, in their later larval stages the cutworms will also feed on young corn, which usually sprouts later in the season.

Thus the extent of cutworm damage in any given field is the product of many variables, including not just temperature but rainfall and planting date of the corn itself. Using their new computer model, and plugging into it relevant data of the sort which will be supplied daily by the CAS observers, set scientists can juggle these variables to produce an "event simulation" for a given cropping region, and on the basis of such simulations issue pest advisories.

In the past two years, Luckmann notes, "We've gotten pretty good.

'We've got the design down and the rationale developed. The question becomes: Can we get the money? We think it's a hell of an idea. . . . Good idea, bad time maybe.' — Stanley Changnon

We've come within one to four days of predicting the exact day when black cutworm will begin to damage corn." A week's warning of a potential cut-worm outbreak, once confirmed by in-field inspection, can enable a farmer to take action before his crop is damaged.

Providing focus

With so many factors of his trade out of his hands, from the weather to fertilizer prices and the grain markets, the farmer is coming to realize that one of the few production inputs he can exploit to his advantage is knowledge. The same thought has occurred (in different forms) to energy conservers, city managers, wildlife preservers and environmental protectors.

And Stanley Changnon. The CAS, for all its number-crunching skills, is only a subsystem in an even more ambitious data system envisioned by Changnon. That larger system is known as INRIC, acronym for Illinois Natural Resources Information Center. In addition to the vast files of the state's scientific surveys, there have been accumulated in Illinois other collections of facts, acquired as part of university research or of state regulatory programs. No one knows how many there may be in all, but Changnon guesses there must be "thousands" relating to the water, weather and climate of Illinois alone.

18/July 1983/Illinois Issues

Water resources in Illinois: the challenge of abundance Illinois is a land of many riches — from the vast veins of coal that underlie much of the state to the fertile farmland that stretches between its borders. Illinois is also rich in water, but this wealth is threatened by pollution, waste and poor management. Adequate supplies of clean water for the future will depend on today's solutions to these problems. Between June and November 1982 Illinois Issues, with funding from The Joyce Foundation, published a six-part series on water resources in Illinois. This series, authored by James Krohe Jr., explores the problems confronting this important resource and how they might be resolved. Now, all six articles have been compiled in Water resources in Illinois: the challenge of abundance. You may order your copy of this special publication today. Simply fill out the order card inserted in this magazine and send it along with $4 plus $1 for postage to Illinois Issues.

Many computers with many data bases are all whirring away largely separate from their counterparts across the state, across town, in some cases across the hall. It is a data system which hardly deserves the name, one which "lacks coordination, unification of data base formats and central focus," according to Changnon.

INRIC was designed to provide what its backers call "centralized accessibility" to this farflung information empire. Disparate data bases would be linked electronically, through a referral staff and central computer housed at the Water Survey. A curious user (agency, school or individual) would contact INRIC by letter, telephone or computer line. Simple information requests would be handled by INRIC referral staff, or — if he has computer access — the user himself. Changnon explains: "Say a lawyer has a client who fell down in front of a grocery store two years ago and he wants to know whether it was raining that day. That's what I call 'anytime' data." Requests which require interpreted data would be referred to survey scientists. Changnon gives one hypothetical example: "We can combine geological data with hydrological data to tell you where the best place is to drill a well in county X."

INRIC is designed to augment existing data systems and be compatible with them. Although its principal aim is service, INRIC would also offer the state an enhanced research capability by providing a means to perform statistical analysis, modeling and interactive operations across the usually well-defended borders of the sciences. In an era in which most "state" research is actually paid for by grants from federal agencies and private industrial and charitable entities, such a system would confer no small advantage in the competition for funds.

Changnon explains, "In the last 20 years or so we learned that the sciences often couldn't handle the kinds of new - interdisciplinary issues which we faced." A joint project by the three Illinois surveys to study the effects of man on the Illinois and Mississippi rivers was one of only 10 projects funded nationwide under the National Science Foundation's long-term ecological research program. The award was "a tremendous coup" in Changnon's words. "Our data base management plan was a winning aspect of that competition. INRIC would enable us to do even more of that kind of research." The costs for the full INRIC system — hardware, data transfer and staff — are estimated to be $6.2 million. Operating funds are expected to be provided by user fees, with the system being self-supporting after five years. Much of the start-up costs, such as the estimated $2 to $3 million the surveys have spent in the last 10 years making their data machine-readable, has already been invested.

In fact, only a little more than $4 million will have to come directly from state general funds. This hardly seems an insuperable sum in a state the size of Illinois. Yet even the modest down payment on the INRIC system proposed by the surveys' parent agency, the Department of Energy and Natural Resources — $565,000 to purchase a mainframe computer, listed as a high priority in DENR's fiscal 1984 budget —  did not survive in Gov. James R. Thompson's March 2 "doomsday budget."

"We're having our tightest economic times in a decade," acknowledges Changnon, "and here we are asking for money. You'd be tempted to say, 'You gotta be out of your mind.' INRIC isn't one of those compelling issues, like crime or highways. It's just something that the state will be better off with than without."

There remains the possibility of funding basic equipment costs from foundation grants or even private sector donations, but that is an alternative Changnon does not now wish to entertain. Concludes Changnon, "We've got the design down and the rationale developed. The question becomes: Can we get the money? We think it's a hell of an idea." Changnon pauses. "Good idea, bad time maybe."□

James Krohe Jr. is associate editor of the Illinois Times in Springfield; he specializes in planning, land use and energy issues.

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