Digital mindset
There is an increasing trend toward web-hosted services for watershed management and GIS. Municipalities and other governing bodies are investing heavily in digitization of hydraulic datasets. More and more datasets are being uploaded to the web everyday, and leveraging them is beneficial. Increased digitization often offers advanced data retrieval methods like the use of APIs, offering benefits such as quick and easy access to even real-time data. There is also a large community of developers in Free and Open Source scientific computing platforms like Python/R.