The principles of Asset Management, have traditionally been applied to Water, wastewater, and transportation Utilities and focused on constructed physical assets. Yet, these principles are applicable to all management functions within a utility or organization. In our case, the principles of asset management have been applied to waterways where the nature of the assets themselves are not all constructed physical structures. The waterways asset management plan we have developed captures conditions along linear assets (streams and channels), including certain natural and constructed assets that can be rehabilitated and maintained to last over an infinite period of time. It captures differences between waterways that are required to support certain specifies of habitat that are of concern and others that do not.To enable analysis of assets by geographic location and asset categories, it is necessary to create an asset register which is a database of assets. It requires a unique ID to be created for each asset in each database in which the asset is recorded and cross referencing the IDs; also it requires an intelligent ID that describes the geographic location of the asset based on its position within an asset hierarchy and the type of asset. The register also contains the set of attributes that can describe the condition of the asset.Asset Management program can be used to monitor the condition of each asset with respect to its level of service, manage the preventive and corrective maintenance programs, and manage the risks. For waterways and watersheds, it is necessary to involve a multi-disciplinary team of biologists, engineers, scientists, operations specialists and management consultants to identify the different levels of service for the asset and identify the relevant attributes that would allow the team to measure the probability of failure of the asset to satisfy the levels of service. The levels of service can be for water supply, water utility and watershed operations.
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