Extensive information on water resources of Karelia and their utilization has been amassed. Manual processing and analysis of these data is very time- and labour-intensive, and subjective errors are likely to occur. Application of GIS technologies in water economy studies is most promising. Northern Water Problems Institute has performed work to create the GIS «Water Consumers of Republic of Karelia». The principal objective was to generate a specialized GIS to support the processes of gathering, maintaining and providing data on the utilization of water resources in Republic of Karelia for economic purposes.
The GIS was created in the MapInfo 9.5 format. It comprises thematic map layers «Drainage basins», «Waterbodies», «Watercourses», «Water consumers», «Water withdrawal», «Wastewater discharges», «Wastewater chemical indices». To make the GIS more convenient to work with, the query system was developed, which enables express retrieval of the necessary information, isolation of certain datasets for a specified year or in dynamics, generation of reports and thematic maps.