Transcript Development and Land Use: Colorado Case Studies

Functional linkage of
watersheds and streams:
FLoWS v1 ArcGIS tools
John Norman, David Theobald, Erin
Peterson, Silvio Ferraz
Natural Resource Ecology Lab, Dept of Recreation
& Tourism, Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523 USA
26 July 2005
Project context

Challenges of STARMAP (EPA STAR):
Addressing science needs Clean Water Act
 Integrate science with states/tribes needs


Assisting statisticians to test tenable hypotheses
generated using understanding of ecological
processes
Goal: to find measures that more closely represent our
understanding of how ecological processes are
operating
Overview


Reach Contributing Areas framework
ArcGIS v9 tools
FLoWS framework
Typically overlapping, hierarchical watersheds
Alternative is a detailed tessellation of reach catchment areas
(RCAs)
RCAs are non-overlapping, edge-matching polygons that are
drawn to that their boundaries include nearby areas that
would likely flow into a given reach.
Use USGS National Hydrography Dataset:
- reach is: a significant segment of surface water that has similar
hydrologic characteristic
In a GIS, a reach is typically represented as a polyline feature
representing a unique head-to-confluence, confluence-toconfluence, confluence-to-mouth, or head-to-mouth segment
in a river network.
Generating RCAs
1.) Filled DEM
2.) Flow Direction
Generating RCAs
3.) Stream Reaches 
4.) RCAs (Yellow)
Landscape Network
Landscape network features and associated relationships table
From graph theory perspective,
reaches are nodes, confluences are
edges
Network connectivity errors
Selections
Distance matrices
Straight-line
Instream distance
Distance matrices (cont.)
Downstream only
Upstream only
Distance matrices (cont.)
Proportion upstream
Proportion downstream
Distance matrices (cont.)
Downstream portion dist only
Number of confluences
Thanks!

Comments? Questions?

Funding/Disclaimer: The work reported here was
developed under the STAR Research Assistance
Agreement CR-829095 awarded by the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to
Colorado State University. This presentation has not
been formally reviewed by EPA. The views
expressed here are solely those of the presenter and
STARMAP, the Program (s)he represents. EPA does
not endorse any products or commercial services
mentioned in this presentation.


FLoWS:
www.nrel.colostate.edu/projects/
starmap
[email protected]
CR - 829095