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PNW RIVER REACH FILE DOCUMENTATION
Description:
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in cooperation with Federal and state agencies, and NW Indian Tribes has produced a 1:100,000-scale River Reach data layer for the Pacific Northwest that will serve water-resource management applications for the next decade or more. The Pacific Northwest (PNW) River Reach Files are a geo-referenced river reach data layer that encompasses the Columbia River Basin within the conterminous United States, the coasts of Oregon and Washington, the Klamath and Goose Lake Basins in southern Oregon and the Bear Lake Basin in southeastern Idaho. A unique conflation algorithm was developed by the USGS-WRD in Portland, Oregon that transferred the reach identifiers from the USEPA 1:250,000-scale RF2 Files to the new 1:100,000-scale hydrography. This process was a primary task of the PNW River Reach Project because these reach identifiers are an integral hydrologic component in a regional Rivers Study known as the Northwest Environmental Data Base(NED). NED is an ongoing effort by Federal and state agencies within the region to compile reach-specific information on rivers in Oregon, Idaho, Washington, and Montana. The PNW Reach Files have been tagged with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agencys (USEPA) reach codes. The PNW Reach Files were designed so reach-specific information could be extracted from a stream network in an upstream or downstream direction using associated feature attribute tables or within a Geographic Information System.
