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The LakeCat Dataset: Accumulated Attributes for NHDPlusV2 (Version 2.1) Catchments for the Conterminous United States: Road and Stream Intersections

Published by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Research and Development (ORD), Center for Public Health and Environmental Assessment (CPHEA), Pacific Ecological Systems Division (PESD), | U.S. Environmental Protection Agency | Metadata Last Checked: July 29, 2025 | Last Modified: 2023-11-13
This dataset represents the density of road and stream crossings within individual local and accumulated upstream catchments for NHDPlusV2 Waterbodies. Catchment boundaries in LakeCat are defined in one of two ways, on-network or off-network. The on-network catchment boundaries follow the catchments provided in the NHDPlusV2 and the metrics for these lakes mirror metrics from StreamCat, but will substitute the COMID of the NHDWaterbody for that of the NHDFlowline. The off-network catchment framework uses the NHDPlusV2 flow direction rasters to define non-overlapping lake-catchment boundaries and then links them through an off-network flow table. The landscape layer (raster) was developed by James Falcone of the USGS. US Census TIGER 2000 line files of roads and the NHDPlusV1 line files of all streams were converted to 30-meter grids where the presence of a street or stream was a 1 and everything else a 0. These were intersected and anything that was a 1 in both grids is the result. The density of road and stream crossings (crossings / square kilometer) were summarized to produce local catchment-level and watershed-level metrics as a continuous data type.

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