The Nooksack River Basin HydroShare Observatory is designed to be used by individual researchers or research or classroom groups collaborating on hydrologic research in the transboundary Nooksack River Basin, State of Washington, USA and Province of British Columbia, Canada. The goal is to increase data and model discovery, computing, and publication functions provided by HydroShare. All resources available in this Collection are publicly available, and contributed by individual authors using HydroShare. The intent of this observatory is to play a cumulative role in maximizing the scientific return on individual investments of contributors conducting research in the Nooksack.

Observatories depend on collections of data and groups of people. In HydroShare, the Nooksack Observatory is a resource type called a 'Collection', and we anticipate the addition of 'Groups' when that specific software functionality is completed (expected for 2016). In short, a collection is an organization of HydroShare data, while a group is an organization of HydroShare users . Collections and Groups are designed to provide efficiency in research by enhancing individual capabilities to progress their research by sharing and using information with the group, and may be organized by geography, discipline, or research topic. If successful, this Observatory will help researchers avoid ‘reinventing the wheel’ and progressing individual and collaborative research studies using shared resources.