Contained within the Atlas of Canada Poster Map Series, is a map depicting the 5 main watersheds in Canada. Building Canadian Water Connections initiative and the Canadian Wildlife Federation have collaborated to produce this map that promotes the importance of watersheds through education. Canada's five ocean watersheds are colour-coded on the map: Pacific Ocean, Arctic Ocean, Hudson Bay, Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. Each of these five massive landscapes contains a hierarchy of watersheds. This map depicts 594 watersheds, most of which are connected and ultimately flow into an ocean.

This feature layer depicts the watershed boundaries of Canada and provides a detailed look at drainage areas and water flow for the entire land mass of Canada.

This map service references the Water Survey of Canada (WSC) data. The WSC has a 3-level hierarchy of drainage areas established in 1927 for the purpose of managing hydrometric stations (recording water levels or rates of flow). They are: Major Drainage Areas, Sub Drainage Areas and Sub-sub Drainage Areas.

This map service includes all three drainage area boundaries as well as the highest order boundary, the ocean drainage area.

A watershed is an area that drains all precipitation received as a runoff or base flow (groundwater sources) into a particular river or set of rivers. The easiest way to describe the network of rivers and lakes on a small-scale map is to show the watersheds. In Canada, there is a detailed hierarchy of watersheds, ranging from the largest (drainage into oceans and their equivalents), down to the smallest ramification. Canada’s ocean watersheds are the Atlantic Ocean, Hudson Bay, Arctic Ocean, Pacific Ocean and Gulf of Mexico.

A drainage basin is an area that drains all precipitation received as a runoff or base flow (groundwater sources) into a particular river or set of rivers. Canada’s major drainage regions are the Atlantic Ocean, Hudson Bay, Arctic Ocean, Pacific Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. Rivers are organized into networks, each with its own recharge area upstream, and drainage channel and mouth downstream. Networks are ordered from ocean to main river to secondary rivers to streams which correspond to ocean basins, river basins, sub-basins, sub-sub-basins, and so forth. The boundary of a watershed is called a drainage divide.

This collection represents the authoritative watershed boundaries for Ontario. The data is based on a framework similar to the Atlas of Canada Fundamental Drainage Areas and the United States Watershed Boundary Dataset, however it adopts a more stringent scientific approach to watershed delineation. The Ontario Watershed Boundaries (OWB) collection includes five data classes: * OWB main: all levels from primary to quaternary and 5th and 6th levels in select areas * OWB primary: all primary watersheds or major drainage areas in the Canadian classification * OWB secondary: all secondary watersheds or sub drainage areas * OWB tertiary: all tertiary watersheds or sub sub drainage areas * OWB quaternary: all quaternary watersheds or 6-digit drainage areas. The OWB data replaces the following data classes: * Provincial Watersheds, Historical

Watershed boundary delineated for Canada-BC hydrometric stations. Currently, watersheds were delineated using 1:50,000 scale boundaries in 1996, and many watersheds encompass entire drainages, instead of just the upstream watersheds. Note - Not yet available, but we are in the process of generating BC hydrometric station upstream watersheds using updated base data, using the following method: Within BC, watershed boundaries are based on the 1:20,000-scale Freshwater Atlas fundamental watersheds, and trimmed using the BC TRIM DEM used to approximate the height-of-land at the station locations. Outside of BC, but within Canada, watershed boundaries were approximated using Canada CDED DEM data for delineation (no "stream burning" was used) and some manual editing of boundaries was done to approximately match hydrology data after the fact. Within U.S.A., the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset was used (at the best scale available for each drainage) to delineate the watershed boundary, with the watershed trimmed using the USGS National Elevation Dataset to approximate the height-of-land when necessary.

This data set contains daily river discharge rates for 20 rivers, and depth for one river, in Arctic Canada between 1943 and 1989. The data were obtained from Environment Canada, Water Resources Branch.

Contained within the Atlas of Canada 8.5x11 series maps is a map which was created as a joint effort by The Atlas of Canada, The National Institute of Statistics, Geography and Informatics, Mexico and the National Atlas of the United States under the sponsorship of the commission for environmental cooperation. The map shows the major North American drainage basins, or wateresheds, which drain into the Atlantic Ocean, Hudson Bay, the Arctic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the gulf of Mexico and teh Caribbean Sea. Each watershed is shown in its own colour, with subdivisions shown in tonal variations. Areas of internal drainage, which lack outlets to the sea, are shown in grey.

HUC-8 level US watersheds and sub-sub-drainage basin level Canadian watersheds that directly or indirectly drain into the Salish Sea. The watersheds at the northeastern and northwestern corners of the bioregion's boundary were clipped along sub-basin boundaries to remove portions of the larger watersheds that drain into Johnstone Strait or Bute Inlet rather than the Salish Sea.All processing and analysis was completed using the NAD 83 UTM Zone 10N projection and coordinate system.Analysis and cartography by Aquila Flower.US Hydrologic Unit Code level 8 (HUC-8) NHD watershed boundaries from the USGS National Hydrography Dataset hosted by the Washington Department of Ecology (https://ecology.wa.gov/Research-Data/Data-resources/Geographic-Information-Systems-GIS/Data)."Water Survey of Canada Sub-Sub-Drainage Area" (WSCSSDA) NHN watershed boundaries from the National Hydro Network hosted by the Canadian Open Data portal (https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/a4b190fe-e090-4e6d-881e-b87956c07977).

Contained within the Atlas of Canada 8.5x11 series maps is a map which was created as a joint effort by The Atlas of Canada, The National Institute of Statistics, Geography and Informatics, Mexico and the National Atlas of the United States under the sponsorship of the commission for environmental cooperation. The map shows the major North American drainage basins, or wateresheds, which drain into the Atlantic Ocean, Hudson Bay, the Arctic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the gulf of Mexico and teh Caribbean Sea. Each watershed is shown in its own colour, with subdivisions shown in tonal variations. Areas of internal drainage, which lack outlets to the sea, are shown in grey.

HUC-8 level US watersheds and sub-sub-drainage basin level Canadian watersheds that directly or indirectly drain into the Salish Sea, including all upper Fraser River drainage basin watersheds. All processing and analysis was completed using the NAD 83 UTM Zone 10N projection and coordinate system.Analysis and cartography by Aquila Flower.US Hydrologic Unit Code level 8 (HUC-8) NHD watershed boundaries from the USGS National Hydrography Dataset hosted by the Washington Department of Ecology (https://ecology.wa.gov/Research-Data/Data-resources/Geographic-Information-Systems-GIS/Data)."Water Survey of Canada Sub-Sub-Drainage Area" (WSCSSDA) NHN watershed boundaries from the National Hydro Network hosted by the Canadian Open Data portal (https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/a4b190fe-e090-4e6d-881e-b87956c07977).

Basemap layer for the Lake Winnipeg Basin can be accessed directly on the National Ecological Framework for Canada. Includes Ecozones, Ecoregions, Ecoprovinces, Ecodistricts, Ecoatlas and the Watersheds of Canada and the USGS Subbasins (HUC-8) and Watersheds (HUC-10).

The development of a hydrologic foundation, essential for advancing our understanding of flow-ecology relationships, was accomplished using the high-resolution physics-based distributed rainfall-runoff model Vflo. We compared the accuracy and bias associated with flow metrics that were generated using Vflo at both a daily and monthly time step in the Canadian River basin, USA. First, we calibrated and applied bias correction to the Vflo model to simulate streamflow at ungaged catchment locations. Next, flow metrics were calculated using both simulated and observed data from stream gage locations. We found discharge predictions using Vflo were more accurate than using drainage area ratios. General correspondence between predicted discharge and the gage data was apparent; however, flow metrics calculated using the Vflo output did not accurately represent flow variability. This work was part of a multidisciplinary project describing water quality, streamflow and runoff, and ecology of the Canadian River Basin from northeastern New Mexico to Lake Eufaula, Oklahoma. This study was done in cooperation with the South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center.

Canadians deserve to know the state of their country’s watersheds. Unfortunately, however, Canada does not have an easily accessible, national system for reporting the health of freshwater ecosystems across the country and the threats they face.

WWF has been working to fill this gap.

First, we developed an assessment framework in consultation with leading freshwater scientists. Next, we used that framework to begin producing reports on the health and threats to Canadian rivers. To date, we have assessed nearly half of Canada’s 25 major watersheds.

This website — watershedreports.wwf.ca — presents our results in an interactive format designed to engage Canadians and raise awareness about the watershed they live in.

We will complete our national assessment by 2017, Canada’s 150th birthday. However, we can’t wait until then to take action on the threats facing Canada’s watersheds.

The Saint Lawrence River is the largest river in Canada based on the volume of water that flows through the river per second. However, the Mackenzie River system, located in the Northwest Territories is the longest river in Canada at about ***** kilometers. Globally, the Nile River is the longest river on Earth, measured at ***** kilometers.

Saint Lawrence River The Saint Lawrence River begins at the outflow of Lake Ontario, the fifth largest lake in Canada. The biggest lake in Canada is Lake Superior, which shares its borders with the United States. The river drains into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, which is one of the largest estuary in the world. Estuaries are partially enclosed bodies of brackish water and act as a transition zone from river environments into maritime environments. The French navigator discovered Saint Lawrence River Saint Lawrence River was named by the first European explorer to sail into the river, Jacques Cartier. As Cartier arrived in the estuary on Saint Lawrence’s feast day, he named the river after the saint.

The National Hydro Network (NHN) focuses on providing a quality geometric description and a set of basic attributes describing Canada's inland surface waters. It provides geospatial digital data compliant with the NHN Standard such as lakes, reservoirs, watercourses (rivers and streams), canals, islands, drainage linear network, toponyms or geographical names, constructions and obstacles related to surface waters, etc. The best available federal and provincial data are used for its production, which is done jointly by the federal and interested provincial and territorial partners. The NHN is created from existing data at the 1:50 000 scale or better. The NHN data have a great potential for analysis, cartographic representation and display and will serve as base data in many applications. The NHN Work Unit Limits were created based on Water Survey of Canada Sub-Sub-Drainage Area.

This web map includes water data - rivers, watersheds and much more.

Summary of statistics, regression analyses, LOADEST regressions, mean annual flow-weighted concentrations/values, and Kendal tau trend analyses of flow-weighted constituent concentrations of dissolved chloride, suspended sediment, dissolved oxygen, pH, and Temperature values of water samples collected intermittently at USGS streamgages on the Canadian River or its tributaries from northeastern New Mexico, to Lake Eufaula in Oklahoma from 1949-2013. Water-quality data were retrieved from the USGS NWIS system in 2014.

The United States is divided and sub-divided into successively smaller hydrologic units which are classified into four levels: regions, sub-regions, accounting units, and cataloging units. The hydrologic units are arranged or nested within each other, from the largest geographic area (regions) to the smallest geographic area (cataloging units). Each hydrologic unit is identified by a unique hydrologic unit code (HUC) consisting of two to eight digits based on the four levels of classification in the hydrologic unit system. A shapefile (or geodatabase) of watersheds for the state of Alaska and parts of western Canada was created by merging two datasets: the U.S. Watershed Boundary Dataset (WBD) and the Government of Canada's National Hydro Network (NHN). Since many rivers in Alaska are transboundary, the NHN data is necessary to capture their watersheds. The WBD data can be found at https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/usgs-national-watershed-boundary-dataset-wbd-downloadable-data-collection-national-geospatial- and the NHN data can be found here: https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/a4b190fe-e090-4e6d-881e-b87956c07977. The included python script was used to subset and merge the two datasets into the single dataset, archived here.

This dataset consists of drainage basin boundaries for selected transboundary basins draining to the Gulf of Alaska in south-east Alaska. Basins were delineated to the basin outlet using a tidal datum of mean high water (MHW). The drainage basins are provided as polygons attributed with basin drainage area and as polylines attributed with the data source for each line segment, respectively.