Dr. Karletta Chief and Team Tackling Water Quality Challenges and COVID-19 in the Navajo Nation
May 30, 2022
Dr. Karletta Chief, Community Engagement Core lead for the University of Arizona Superfund Research Center (UA SRC), published an article in the January/February 2022 issue of Water Resources IMPACT Magazine titled, “It takes a team: Tackling water quality challenges and COVID-19 in the Navajo Nation,” which recounts the efforts of a team of experts and students to create a useable database of water quality data in the Navajo Nation.
In 2020, scholars found that the lack of access to water was associated with a higher rate of COVID-19 cases in indigenous communities in the United States.
The Navajo Nation invited a team of water quality experts and students from a wide range of fields to learn more about the role of water access and the spread and transmission of COVID- 19 and to develop a tool for assessing water quality more broadly.
The multidisciplinary team compiled existing databases from public sources that helped to understand how limited water access affected the transmission of COVID-19 in the Navajo Nation. For the data to be effective, the team had to encompass many variables, and they developed and populated a database with information from multiple sources and geographic scales.
The team next turned to developing an internet-based geographic information system (GIS) to allow potential users to get access to the compiled water quality dataset and visualize the data in helpful ways. Without a way to access, navigate, and interpret the data, the information is of little use.
The team designed the Navajo Nation Water GIS Portal, a web-based application, to give users a chance to engage with water quality data.