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.

IMPORTANT NOTICE This item has moved to a new organization and will enter Mature Support on April 17th, 2025. This item is scheduled to be Retired and removed from ArcGIS Online on June 17th, 2025. We encourage you to switch to using the item on the new organization as soon as possible to avoid any disruptions within your workflows. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment below or email our Living Atlas Curator (livingatlascurator@esri.ca) The new version of this item can be found here. 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. In particular, the modeling work of the NHN was based in part on Linear Reference System (LRS) concepts. This approach allows the management of geometric representation separately from attribute information (referred to as event in LRS). Unique Identifiers are associated with each geometric and event object. These IDs (called National Identifiers - NIDs) will lead to more efficient management of updates between data producers and data users. 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. Additional information, including documentation and pre-packaged file downloads are available on Canada's Open Government website: https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/a4b190fe-e090-4e6d-881e-b87956c07977

The Water Survey of Canada (WSC) is the national authority responsible for the collection, interpretation and dissemination of standardized water resource data and information in Canada. In partnership with the provinces, territories and other agencies, WSC operates over 2800 active hydrometric gauges across the country. WSC maintains and provides real-time and historic hydrometric data for some 8000 active and discontinued stations. This dataset consists of a set of polygons that represent the drainage areas of both active and discontinued discharge stations. Users are encouraged to report any errors using the “Contact Us” webpage at: https://weather.gc.ca/mainmenu/contact_us_e.html?site=water

A vector representation of stream networks is a crucial dataset for the modelling the surface water and groundwater components of the hydrologic cycle. For many usages a crucial attribute of the drainage network is a digital topology and hierarchal stream order attribute (e.g., Strahler stream order). In Canada jurisdictional stream networks are available for the provinces and territories and nationally for Canada in the National Hydrological Network (NHN) dataset. Unfortunately, the NHN data lacks the same topological and attribute information that is available for numerous provinces due to standardization for the entire country. For Canada1Water it was also necessary to have a harmonized dataset with the United States, for both the southern transboundary watersheds and the Alaskan watersheds. This report documents the processes completed to upgrade the topological and graph network support for NHN and provide continuous connectivity with US datasets. It also highlights and corrects a number of stream density and stream order issues that occur within Canada across provincial and territorial borders and NTS tiles. All vector processing was completed in RivEX software extension for ArcMap. Following complete topological correction stream classification was assigned and a table of the node graph network developed. Additional work was then completed to normalize stream density particularly amongst low-order streams between British Columbia and the Yukon and amongst local NTS tiles in Quebec and Ontario. Corrected NHN Strahler stream order assignment was validated against a number of provincial and watershed datasets, all of which already have Strahler stream order attributed. These datasets are the same underlying digitized vector data, so there are no differences in node or polyline positions. Strahler stream order assignment validation was only done by visual comparison as due to differences in vector segments a statistical comparison is complicated. The transboundary integrated C1W stream network with complete classification provides a seamless national dataset to support transdisciplinary studies (fisheries, wildlife, health, pesticide and nutrient issues, mining impact, ecosystem restoration, numeric modelling) that involve a knowledge of stream distribution and ranking.

The hydrographic features of the CanVec series include watercourses, water linear flow segments, hydrographic obstacles (falls, rapids, etc.), waterbodies (lakes, watercourses, etc.), permanent snow and ice features, water wells and springs. The Hydrographic features theme provides quality vector geospatial data (current, accurate, and consistent) of Canadian hydrographic phenomena. It aims to offer a geometric description and a set of basic attributes on hydrographic features that comply with international geomatics standards, seamlessly across Canada. The CanVec multiscale series is available as prepackaged downloadable files and by user-defined extent via a Geospatial data extraction tool. Related Products: Topographic Data of Canada - CanVec Series

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).

These digital terrain models (DTM) offer a regional numerical representation of Quebec's relief based on altimetric (altitude) and planimetric (rectangular or geographic) data. They are the result of a collaboration between the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forests (MRNF) and Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) within the framework of the Agreement to produce an up-to-date digital map of northern Quebec and the creation of the product “National Hydro Network (RHN)” for the territory of Quebec. When integrated into a geographic information system, these models allow the implementation of multiple types of spatial analyses such as natural risks, landscape analysis, infrastructure implementation, etc. NCDs are obtained as a result of hypsometric and hydrographic data processing that uses the concept of hydro-coherence that uses the concept of hydro-coherence consisting in interpolating altimetric values by ensuring a connected drainage network and an accurate representation of crests and river courses. water. The oriented RHN filament makes it possible to grade lakes and to control the altimeter descent of watercourses. The final product is a quality portrait of relief on a scale of 1/50,000. DNTs provide altitude values that are based on a grid with a resolution of 0.324 arcseconds in geographic coordinates, which corresponds to a resolution of about 10 meters in the field.**This third party metadata element was translated using an automated translation tool (Amazon Translate).**

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).

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 land cover data set was produced by vectorizing raster thematic data originating from classified Landsat 5 and Landsat 7 ortho-images, for agricultural and forest areas of Canada, and for Northern Territories. The forest cover was produced by the Earth Observation for Sustainable Development (EOSD) project, an initiative of the Canadian Forest Service (CFS) with the collaboration of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and in partnership with the provincial and territorial governments. The agricultural coverage is produced by the National Land and Water Information Service (NLWIS) of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC). Northern Territories land cover was realized by the Canadian Centre of Remote Sensing (CCRS). Land cover data were classified according to a harmonized legend build from the partner's legends and are provided at 1:250,000 resolution. Tied to the GeoBase Data Alignment Layer (GDAL), the land cover product is aligned with other GeoBase data layers such as the National Road Network and the National Hydro Network. It can also be used in combination with both the GeoBase Landsat 7 and SPOT 4 and 5 orthoimagery. The data files are available for downloading in GML (Geography Markup Language) and ESRI Shapefile formats.

Ontario Integrated Hydrology (OIH) data is used to generate watersheds and support provincial-scale hydrology applications including: * watershed generation * hydrologic modelling * watercourse network analysis Four key datasets are represented in each data package: * stream network (Enhanced Watercourse) * hydrology-enforced digital elevation model DEM * flow direction grid (Enhanced Flow Direction - EFDIR) * raster representation of the stream network (StreamGrid) Technical information For the first time, OIH data is complete for the entire province making it possible to create a watershed for any location in Ontario. This includes areas flowing in from neighbouring provinces and Minnesota with the following exceptions: * points on the international border that drain to Lake Superior, south of Pigeon River * points on the international border that drain the Great Lakes connecting channels and St. Lawrence River stateside * points along the Ottawa River that drain from Quebec Special note: North West package The North West package contains hydrography data for the entire Rainy River Basin, an area which straddles the international border between Canada and the United States. The data stateside originates from the National Hydrography Dataset (NHD) as of February/March 2014. This data has been harmonized with the Ontario Hydro Network (OHN) to create the Enhanced Watercourse and Integrated Waterbody layers found within the North West package. For more information on when the data was initially extracted and incorporated, refer to these fields stored in the attribute table of each vector layer in the geodatabase: * Effective Date (EFF_DATE) * Geometry Update Date (GEO_UPD_DT) The data stateside is a static snapshot of NHD intended to support regional modeling. Please refer to the United States Geological Survey (USGS) website for the most current version of NHD. Data is updated after the completion of major updates to source data (such as OHN and/or the Provincial DEM).

Lake depth plays a crucial role in understanding large-scale biogeochemical processes. The thickness of the hypolimnion, influenced by lake depth, is a key factor in oxygen dynamics and carbon processing within lakes. Furthermore, lake depth impacts seasonal ice-off dates and CO2 emissions. Bathymetry shapes lake mixing dynamics, which in turn regulate methane (CH4) emissions and phosphorus release from sediments. Consequently, landscape-scale biogeochemical studies of lake-dominated regions require extensive and accurate bathymetric data. In Canada, more than a million lakes remain without detailed bathymetric data. However, between the 1940s and 1990s, the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry produced bathymetric maps for over 11,000 lakes across Ontario. These maps have been scanned and are publicly accessible via Ontario's Open Data Portal (https://data.ontario.ca/dataset/historic-bathymetry-maps). From these historical maps, maximum depths were manually extracted and compiled into this dataset. In addition to maximum depths, lake geometry has been derived using lake polygons provided by the National Hydro Network (NHN) from Natural Resources Canada https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/a4b190fe-e090-4e6d-881e-b87956c07977). Morphometric metrics such as circularity, shoreline complexity, and relative depth were calculated from these polygons and the bathymetric data. This dataset offers a critical resource for understanding the geomorphological and biogeochemical dynamics of lakes across Ontario, Canada.

The boundary of the Salish Sea Bioregion follows the outline of watersheds that drain into the sea. Throughout most of the region, the boundary exactly follows the borders of HUC-8 level US watersheds and sub-sub-drainage basin level Canadian watersheds that directly or indirectly drain into the Salish Sea. Watersheds in the Fraser River’s upper drainage area were excluded. The watersheds at the northeastern and northwestern corners of the 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.The Salish Sea is defined based on legal definitions used in Washington and British Columbia as consisting of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Puget Sound, Georgia Strait, and their associated bays, channels, and inlets. Definitions of the northern border vary slightly among sources. We used a generous interpretation and included all the channels and inlets south of Johnstone Strait and Bute Inlet that connect to the Strait of Georgia.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).

This North American Environmental Atlas data are standardized geospatial data sets at 1:10,000,000 scale. A variety of basic data layers (e.g. roads, railroads, populated places, political boundaries, hydrography, bathymetry, sea ice and glaciers) have been integrated so that their relative positions are correct. This collection of data sets forms a base with which other North American thematic data may be integrated. Any data outside of Canada, Mexico, and the United States of America included in the North American Environmental Atlas data sets is strictly to complete the context of the data.The North American Environmental Atlas – Lakes and Rivers dataset displays the coastline, linear hydrographic features (major rivers, streams, and canals), and area hydrographic features (major lakes and reservoirs) of North America at a reference spatial scale of 1:1,000,000.This map offers a seamless integration of hydrographic features derived from cartographic products generated by Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), United States Geological Survey (USGS), National Institute of Statistics and Geography, (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía-Inegi), National Water Commission (Comisión Nacional del Agua-Conagua).This current version of the North America Lakes and Rivers dataset supersedes the version published by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation in 2011.Files Download