MRC launches interactive Mekong data portal

Mekong data portal 

The Mekong River Commission (MRC) on 9 April launched a revitalized online data service platform that assembles, analyses, and visualizes data about the health and condition of the Mekong River.

The platform, which is called MRC’s Data and Information Services Portal or Data Portal, is designed to help governments, development practitioners, private developers, academics and citizens better understand critical issues in the areas of hydrology, sediment, water quality, fisheries, ecological health, climate change, flood and drought in the Mekong River basin.

“Accessible, easy-to-use and quality-assured data can contribute to better planning and decision-making that leads to significant economic and societal benefits.

“Our Data Portal is a one-stop service window that provides a platform for transforming data into evidence-based stories on Mekong critical issues that offer the public with better information to shape policies and actions that matter to them most,” Winai Wangpimool, Director of Technical Support Division of the MRC Secretariat, said in MRC's press release on 9 April.

The MRC’s data portal aggregates and visualizes data collected by the MRC’s river basin water monitoring networks and other official data from the four MRC member countries – Cambodia, Lao PDR, Thailand and Viet Nam – and its upstream dialogue partner, China.

The exchange and sharing of the data are governed by the MRC’s Procedures for Data, Information Exchange and Sharing (PDIES) – the standard procedures that operationalize data and information exchange among the four countries – where the MRC Secretariat is the designed official data custodian.

The platform represents a storehouse of data, where at least 10,333 datasets are currently available. The datasets include current and historical hydrometeorological and climate time-series, spatial maps, atlases, photographs and sectorial datasets that can be easily searched and filtered.