How much of your creek is already spoken for?
It is August, the creek is low, and everyone downstream is asking the same question. thebutterflyer puts the water promised on each stream right next to the water actually flowing, on a map updated every day.
Picture an evening in early August. You walk down to check the intake, and the creek is thinner than you have seen it in years. Your neighbour's pump is running. Someone at the hall mentioned a new licence application upstream.
You hold a water licence. So do others on this creek. But standing there, you cannot answer the question that matters: how much water has been promised to everyone on this stream, and how much is actually in it right now?
What not knowing costs you
Without that answer, you plan blind. You guess whether to cut the second hay crop short, whether to move cattle early, whether to call the neighbours before things get tense.
The figures exist. Licences are public records and flow is measured. They just sit in separate places, in formats few people have the evenings to dig through. So the conversation at the hall runs on hunches, and the people who speak up at a council meeting or a watershed table rarely have the numbers in front of them.
That costs you time, it costs you sleep, and it can cost trust between neighbours who share the same water.
Promised water next to flowing water
thebutterflyer builds community analysis tools from public data. The first is a map of every stream within 200 km of Falkland, BC, and it does one thing well: it shows the water licensed on each stream beside the flow measured on it.
Here is how you would use it on that August evening:
Open the map and find your creek. You see the water licences on that stream, so you know how much has been promised to licence holders. Right beside it, you see the measured flow. Now the gap, or the lack of one, is in plain sight.
Check again tomorrow. The map is updated daily, so you are not working from last season's picture while the creek keeps dropping.
Look at the streams around yours, too. Every stream in the 200 km radius is on the map, so a watershed group or local government can compare creeks across the region instead of one at a time.
What changes for you
You stop guessing. When the creek runs low, you can see whether it is carrying more or less than what has been promised on it, and make your irrigation and herd decisions with that in hand.
When a new licence application comes up, or the topic lands on a council agenda, you can bring the same public numbers everyone else can check. The conversation moves from who feels what to what the stream is actually doing.
Small causes, big effects. Find your creek and see where it stands today.