Mean Fraction of Summer Runoff from Forest Service Lands (Map Service)

Available water supply varies greatly across the United States depending on topography, climate, elevation and geology. Forested and mountainous locations, such as national forests, tend to receive more precipitation than adjacent non-forested or low-lying areas. However, contributions of national forest lands to regional streamflow volumes is largely unknown. Using outputs from the Variable Infiltration Capacity hydrologic model, we calculated mean annual and mean summer (July and August) streamflow metrics based on total flow and flow from national forest lands for each 1:100,000 scale National Hydrography Dataset stream reach in the contiguous United States. Specifically, this data publication contains twenty-one comma-delimited ASCII text files (for different drainage areas and processing units across the United States) containing 1915-2011 mean annual flow and mean summer flow.

Data can be downloaded here: Geodatabase or Shapefile

These files also contain the mean annual and mean summer flows from National Forest System (NFS) lands as well as the portion of total mean annual and summer flow contributed by flow from NFS lands.

These data provide insight into 1915-2011 hydrologic regimes and national forest contributions to total water yield. These non-spatial files were then merged and joined to the September 2012 snapshot of the National Hydrography Dataset (NHD), version 2.

Note: 'Forest Service lands' are here defined as those lands within the Forest Service administrative boundaries; these include some inholdings and other non-USFS lands enclosed within these boundaries.

This record was taken from the USDA Enterprise Data Inventory that feeds into the https://data.gov catalog. Data for this record includes the following resources:

For complete information, please visit https://data.gov.