View Watershed Characterisitics Using StreamStats

Import Packages

To get started, download the necessary Python packages. The GeoPandas package is an open source project that assists in working with geospatial data in Python. Learn more about GeoPandas.

import streamstats
import geopandas as gpd

Indentify watershed

To identify a HUC, use a latitude and longitude value to select a specific watershed. Assign cordinates to variables lat and lon. Using StreamStat’s data, assign location to a variable that will represent the delineated watershed using the USGS StreamStats API.

lat, lon = 39.966256, -105.482227
ws = streamstats.Watershed(lat=lat, lon=lon)

Find the Hydrologic Unit Code (HUC) of the watershed

The USGS delineates watershed using a series of numbers based a hierarchal region system. Every watershed is assigned a series of numbers called the hydrological unit code (HUC). StreamStats uses HUC to identify and delineate watersheds. Learn more about Hydrologic Units . The ws.huc function will return the HUC of the identified watershed.

ws.huc

Out:

'10190005'

Find Characteristics of the watershed

The function ws.characteristics() will return the available basin characteristics for the identified watershed.In order to return information on a specific characteristic, use function ws.get_characteristic('StatLabel'). Learn more about StreamStats Basin Characteristic Definitions.

# Available characteristics
ws.characteristics

# Specific characteristics
ws.get_characteristic('DRNAREA')

Out:

{'ID': 0, 'name': 'Drainage Area', 'description': 'Area that drains to a point on a stream', 'code': 'DRNAREA', 'unit': 'square miles', 'value': 38.6}