U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

icon-dot-gov

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

icon-https

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Waterfalls and Rapids in the Conterminous United States Linked to the National Hydrography Datasets V2.0

This GeoJSON dataset contains information about 10780 waterfall and 1080 rapid locations (referred to as falls throughout the metadata) and characteristics (e.g. type and height) for the conterminous United States. This dataset centralizes known information about falls while providing basic quality control (i.e. resolving duplicate records and spatial accuracy checks) and linkages to stream networks intended to facilitate stream network analyses. Locations of falls were sourced from the World Waterfall Database (WWD, www.worldwaterfalldatabase.com), the US Forest Service Center for Aquatic Technology Transfer (acquired from Southeast Aquatic Barrier Inventory), and Geographic Names Information System (GNIS, https://geonames.usgs.gov). The coordinates and spatial attributes from source data were used to verify locations using The HydroLink Tool (https://maps.usgs.gov/hydrolink). The HydroLink Tool was also used to address locations (similar to the concept of street addresses) to both the National Hydrography Dataset Plus Medium Resolution Version 2.1 (1:100,000 scale)(NHDPlusV2.1) and National Hydrography Dataset High Resolution (1:24,000 scale)(NHD HR) geospatial stream networks. The development of this dataset did not impose strict fall definitions but instead compiled qualified falls as defined by sources while capturing characteristics when available to help users identify falls of interest for any given use case. More specifically there is a gradation of waterfalls represented in the dataset where general fall types are defined by source datasets but are not standardized by USGS staff.

Get Data and Metadata
Author(s) Daniel J Wieferich orcid, Wesley M Daniel orcid, Justin M Procopio orcid, Cayla R Morningstar orcid
Publication Date 2020-07-10
Beginning Date of Data 2014
Ending Date of Data 2020-03
Data Contact
DOI https://doi.org/10.5066/P9QQTKA0
Citation Wieferich, D.J., Daniel, W.M., Procopio, J.M., and Morningstar, C.R., 2020, Waterfalls and Rapids in the Conterminous United States Linked to the National Hydrography Datasets V2.0: U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P9QQTKA0.
Metadata Contact
Metadata Date 2020-08-27
Related Publication
Citations of these data No citations of these data are known at this time.
Access public
License http://www.usa.gov/publicdomain/label/1.0/
Loading...
Harvest Source: ScienceBase
Harvest Date: 2021-11-19T04:42:53.907Z