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Geospatially derived environmental characteristics to prioritize watersheds for research and monitoring needs within 18 hydrologic regions across the United States

Metadata Updated: September 24, 2025

Water availability for human and ecosystem needs is a function of both water quantity and water quality, as described in the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Water Science Strategy (Evenson and others, 2013). Recently, a quantitative approach to prioritize candidate watersheds for monitoring investment was developed to understand changes in water availability and advance the objectives of new USGS programs (Van Metre and others, 2020). In this study design, the contiguous United States (CONUS) was divided into 18 regions (referred to here as “hydrologic regions” or “HRs”) with relatively homogeneous hydrologic drivers and processes to represent the wide diversity in conditions that exist across the CONUS. The gap analysis focused on prioritizing new capabilities beyond the current USGS science in discharge and constituent concentration trends to develop integrated capabilities for assessing and modeling of the water-quality drivers of aquatic ecosystem health. Water availability can be limited by various water-quality parameters such as temperature, salinity, excess nutrients, suspended sediment, geogenic constituents, and other contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) depending on water sources and human or ecosystem needs (Stanton and others, 2017). This data release contains more than 100 geospatial variables summarized for each watershed at the Hydrologic Unit level 4 (HUC4) that were used to prioritize watersheds targeted for USGS research. Additionally, the data release includes the polygon layers of the modified HUC4 watersheds and the hydrologic regions used for the analyses.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

Downloads & Resources

Dates

Metadata Created Date September 13, 2025
Metadata Updated Date September 24, 2025

Metadata Source

Harvested from DOI USGS DCAT-US

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date September 13, 2025
Metadata Updated Date September 24, 2025
Publisher U.S. Geological Survey
Maintainer
Identifier http://datainventory.doi.gov/id/dataset/usgs-6408e679d34e76f5f75e4f35
Data Last Modified 2023-08-15T00:00:00Z
Category geospatial
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 010:12
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://ddi.doi.gov/usgs-data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id cc3c86da-00fc-45dd-97a2-51741d141743
Harvest Source Id 2b80d118-ab3a-48ba-bd93-996bbacefac2
Harvest Source Title DOI USGS DCAT-US
Metadata Type geospatial
Old Spatial -127.2656, 22.5937, -60.8203, 51.6180
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 35cd5cf36632c013adfbee852cbca03c8233a3fdeff72d4e3653c2a0737ebd96
Source Schema Version 1.1
Spatial {"type": "Polygon", "coordinates": -127.2656, 22.5937, -127.2656, 51.6180, -60.8203, 51.6180, -60.8203, 22.5937, -127.2656, 22.5937}

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