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EnviroAtlas - Agricultural Buffers by 12-Digit HUC for the Conterminous United States

Published by U.S. EPA Office of Research & Development (ORD) - National Exposure Research Laboratory (NERL) | U.S. Environmental Protection Agency | Metadata Last Checked: January 27, 2026 | Last Modified: 2017-06-01T00:00:00.000+00:00
This EnviroAtlas dataset estimates the average agricultural buffer width, the percentage of agricultural lands with flow paths that would intersect natural land cover before reaching a stream, and the percentage of each subwatershed (12-digit HUC) that is unbuffered agricultural land. Subwatershed summaries are calculated for the contiguous United States. The map uses a combined land use/land cover map from the 2006 National Land Cover Database (NLCD) and the 2010 Cropland Data Layer (CDL). It combines agriculture, forests, grasslands and wetlands with stream networks and elevation datasets in flow path models to find agricultural flow paths that do or do not intersect buffers, and counts the agricultural flow paths through buffers adjacent to streams in order to determine average buffer widths on agricultural lands. This dataset was produced by the US EPA to support research and online mapping activities related to EnviroAtlas. EnviroAtlas (https://www.epa.gov/enviroatlas) allows the user to interact with a web-based, easy-to-use, mapping application to view and analyze multiple ecosystem services for the contiguous United States. The dataset is available as downloadable data (https://edg.epa.gov/data/Public/ORD/EnviroAtlas) or as an EnviroAtlas map service. Additional descriptive information about each attribute in this dataset can be found in its associated EnviroAtlas Fact Sheet (https://www.epa.gov/enviroatlas/enviroatlas-fact-sheets).

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