The Water Resources Atlas is an iMapBC application with enhanced query functionality to enable the display of detailed water related data, including watersheds, water quantity and quality monitoring sites, aquifers, water wells and flood protection works.

Interested in knowing where your community's water comes from and how it compares with the quality of water in other areas? Use this map application to find detailed information about our province's water resources.

All double line river polygons for the province

Assessment Watersheds are mesoscale aquatic units designed to replace the 3rd order 1:50K watersheds. Assessment Watersheds are based on groupings of fundamental watersheds using FWA watershed code and local code, with a target size of between 2,000ha and 10,000ha.

All fundamental watershed polygons generated from watershed boundary lines, bank edges, delimiter edges, coastline edges, and administrative boundary edges

This dataset is derived from the Freshwater Atlas Watersheds and the BC Water Management Precincts. It provides conservation levels for the Kootenay Boundary Stream Watch project. These data are updated as required by the Kootenay Boundary Region, Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development, Government of British Columbia. For more information on the Freshwater Atlas Watershed data please visit: https://catalogue.data.gov.bc.ca/dataset/freshwater-atlas-watersheds For more information on the Water Management Precinct data please visit: https://catalogue.data.gov.bc.ca/dataset/water-management-precincts Please visit the BC Drought Information Portal or https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/environment/air-land-water/water/drought-flooding-dikes-dams/drought-information for the latest BC drought information.

Groupings of BC Freshwater Atlas (FWA) Assessment Watersheds dissolved to a manageable scale for water licensing. Each Natural Resource Region developed their own process for grouping and naming the watersheds based on the region's water management needs. For information about the source FWA Assessment Watersheds see: https://catalogue.data.gov.bc.ca/dataset/97d8ef37-b8d2-4c3b-b772-6b25c1db13d0

Water Regions within the RDN are the watershed groups used for water budget analysis and administrative purposes. Water Regions combine all named and unnamed subwatersheds within an identified region into a grouping useful for water management purposes. For example, the French Creek Water Region comprises the named watersheds of French Creek, Grandon Creek, Morningstar Creek, Carey Creek, Romney Creek, as well as several small, unnamed watersheds at the coast.Geoprocessing: Water Regions represent a Spatial Merge of the BC Freshwater Atlas Named Watersheds polygons. Source Metadata available here:https://apps.gov.bc.ca/pub/geometadata/metadataDetail.do?recordUID=50644&recordSet=ISO19115To view the Water Regions web mapping application: https://rdn.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=5ec9bd56b5374ef7814c0281db9b70f9

Water temperature is a key feature of freshwater ecosystems but comprehensive datasets are severely lacking, a limiting factor in research and management of freshwater species and habitats. An existing statistical stream temperature model developed for British Columbia (BC), Canada, was refit to predict August mean stream temperatures, a common index of stream thermal regime also used in thermalscapes developed for the western United States (US). Thermalscapes of predicted August mean stream temperature were produced for 680,000 km of stream network at approximately 400 m intervals. Temperature predictions were averaged for 20-year periods from 1981–2100 to produce 86 scenarios: one for each historical period (i.e., 1981–2000, 2001–2020), and 21 for each future period (i.e., six global climate models and an ensemble average under three representative concentration pathways). The final model performance was consistent with other published regional-scale statistical models (R2 = 0.79, RMS..., Please see Weller et al. (2023) for full methods. Weller, J.D., R.D. Moore & J.C. Iacarella (2023) Stream thermalscape scenarios for British Columbia, Canada, Canadian Water Resources Journal / Revue canadienne des ressources hydriques, DOI: 10.1080/07011784.2023.2267028, Zipped files (.zip) are stored in an ESRI geodatabase (.gdb) and can be accessed through open-souce GIS software (e.g., QGIS), Data from: Stream Thermalscape Scenarios for British Columbia, Canada, Dryad, Dataset, https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.bzkh189fk

All thermalscapes (i.e., stream temperature layers) are stored as linear feature classes in 'bc_stream_thermalscapes.gdb'. The geodatabase contains a linear feature class for each major drainage region in British Columbia (BC), Canada, as defined by the BC Freshwater Atlas (FWA). All feature classes share the same set of attribute fields.

Full details on the development of the stream temperature model ('BC AugTw model') and associated thermalscapes can be found in 'Stream Thermalscape Scenarios for British Columbia, Canada' (Weller et al. 2023). The thermalscape network is a subset of linear stream network layers from the British Columbia Freshwater Atlas (FWA; information licensed under the Open Government Licence British Columbia): the network includes only 'main' flow paths, and excludes lakes and reaches draining less than 1km^2. Linear features and key ...

Flow network arcs (observed, inferred and constructed). Contains no banks, coast or watershed bourdary arcs. Directionalized and connected. Contains heirarchial key and route identifier

Water obstacles (rapids, falls, etc)

The polygons in this layer delineate headwater-to-saltwater drainage basins of the Southeast Alaska Drainage Basin (SEAKDB) which includes the Alaska portion of the perhumid coastal temperate rainforest (PCTR). All geoprocessing was performed using ESRI ArcGIS version 9.3.1 or 10.x. This data set was derived from 4 main sources:1) The United States Geological Survey's (USGS) digital Watershed Boundary Dataset (WBD). The boundaries in the WBD were mapped at the subwatershed (12-digit) 6th level ("HUC12"). Citation for this data source: Coordinated effort between the United States Department of Agriculture-Natural Resources Conservation Service (USDA-NRCS), the United States Geological Survey (USGS), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The Watershed Boundary Dataset (WBD) was created from a variety of sources from each state and aggregated into a standard national layer for use in strategic planning and accountability. Watershed Boundary Dataset for Alaska. Available URL: "http://datagateway.nrcs.usda.gov" [Accessed March 9, 2012]. 2)British Columbia's Corporate Watershed Base (CWB) Freshwater Atlas Watershed Groups digital dataset (FWWTRSHDGR), downloaded from GeoBC on 3/14/2012. This site has since been replaced by DataBC. Freshwater Atlas documentation can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.geobc.gov.bc.ca/pub/outgoing/FreshWaterAtlasDocuments/FWAv1.3-SDE.WarehouseModelSpecification.rev3.doc. Metadata details can be found at https://apps.gov.bc.ca/pub/geometadata/metadataDetail.do. 3) At the USGS HUC8 (8-digit) and Canada NHN 4-digit drainage levels (CAN4), trans US-Canada watershed boundaries are consistent with the US-Canada hydrographic data harmonization revisions made as of 11/29/2012 (http://datagateway.nrcs.usda.gov). See nhd.usgs.gov/Canada-US_Hydro_Harmonization.pdf for more information on this project. 4) At drainage levels finer than HUC8/CAN4, screen digitizing was used to match up watershed boundaries crossing the Canada-US boundary. The best of availble source material was used for digitizing, including contours generated from USGS 2-arc second (~50 meter) NED DEMS, SPOT 20-meter DEMs, Environment Yukon 30-meter DEMs, and BC TRIM 25-meter DEMs; Tongass National Forest color and black and white orthophotography, satellite imagery obtained from the US Forest Service, Google Earth satillite imagery, and 1:63,360 USGS topographic maps. After a seamless watershed coverage was created using the above 4 sources, subbasins were "aggregated up" (i.e., merged) to depict entire headwater to saltwater drainages. Watersheds were clipped using an Identity operation to an approximate mean high water (MHW) shoreline where NOAA National Shoreline data (through 2011) existed. Where NOAA MHW data was absent, the high water line is represented using other shoreline digital data sources from the US Forest Service (feature class "Intertidal_PL", description=LND) and the US National Park Service (shapefile "HHTide"), and the US National Hydrography Dataset (NHD). In addition, heads up digitizing was necessary where shore recources were absent, of poor quality, or where the previously listed sources needed to be edge-matched. Data sources for digitizing include the US DEMs and orthophotos listed above under #4, 30-meter ASTER DEMs, Google Earth imagery, and US Forest Service 1:15,840 aerial photography stereo-pairs, All multi-part features were converted to single-part. Island polygons less than 10 hectares were deleted. All islands less than 100 hectares are considered a single watershed. If islands less than 100 hectares were mapped in the WBD as more than one watershed, the boundaries were merged.UPDATE, 5/11/2017: Portions of the Alsek drainage boundary were edited using updated digital boundaries obtained from Janet Curran at the USGS. The updates were a part of a flood frequency report (USGS SIR 2016-5024) and StreamStats project.

The map represents the mean value (in millimetres) of the annual loss of water through the evaporation process from the surfaces of open water bodies, such as ponds and shallow lakes and reservoirs based on the 10-year period 1957 to 1966. The greatest mean annual lake evaporation (more than 900 millimetres) occurs in southwest Saskatchewan and southeast Alberta. The smaller means (less than 100 millimetres) appear in the Arctic Islands. The mean annual lake evaporation across Canada generally decreases from south to north. The map also shows the location of the stations, which are part of the "Class A pan evaporation network" used for the analysis and additional stations operating in 1974.The rate at which water evaporates from a lake depends primarily on two factors: first, the rate at which energy is supplied to the evaporating surface to effect the change of state of water to water vapour (requires 2.47 joules per kilogram) and secondly, the rate of diffusion of water vapour away from the surface. The main energy supply for evaporation is generally through the heating of the upper part of the lake by the sun, although in some cases the net energy advected into the water body, by streams for example, may also be important. For a specific lake surface temperature, the rate of diffusion of water vapour is determined in a complex manner by atmospheric temperature, humidity, and wind speed. For small, shallow water bodies evaporation is greater for sunny days during the summer when the water temperature is high, the humidity is low, and winds are brisk. For deeper lakes, heat storage becomes an important consideration and evaporation is not as closely associated with the daily energy input by the sun's radiation. For example, large amounts of water evaporate from deep lakes during the autumn when their surface temperatures are much higher than air temperatures, while the smaller lakes, because of lack of energy storage, evaporate very little. The converse takes place during late spring and early summer when the large deep lakes evaporate very little because of their relatively low surface temperatures.

3,877.50 (%) in 2021. Annual freshwater withdrawals, total (% of internal resources)