What are “virtual watersheds”?
A “virtual watershed” is a computer-based geospatial simulation of riverine landscapes used to enumerate numerous aspects of watershed landforms and processes, and human interactions over a range of scales. See this Storymap on the history of virtual watersheds.
A virtual watershed is more than a stream layer or hydrography and it’s characterized by five analytical capabilities: 1) routing information downstream and upstream, 2) connecting river networks to terrestrial environments, 3) discretizing landscapes and land uses into facets of appropriate scales to identify interactions, 4) characterizing landforms and 5) attributing river segments with key stream and watershed information.
Browse exisiting Netmap watersheds or contact us to create a custom one for your project.
How to read our Virtual Watershed maps
Map Example - A Breakdown
NetMap’s virtual watershed includes local contributing areas on either side of all approximately 100 m long stream reaches, called “drainage wings” (A, B). With NetMap tools, analysts can map all drainage wings in a watershed (C).
The primary purpose of drainage wings it to transfer terrestrial information of all types, including roads, erosion potential, forest age, and any imported GIS layers (soils, climate etc.) into the channel network (D, E).
Information in the channel network can be aggregated downstream or upstream.
The ultimate objective is to spatially relate terrestrial to aquatic attributes to identify important interactions (F).
With Virtual Watersheds you get access to Netmap Tools
Over 100 watershed analysis support tools operate as an “add-in” in ArcMap 10.x. All tools and map products are hyperlinked to over 600 pages of online technical help.
TerrainWorks runs all necessary tools, thus saving you the effort. But you still get the tools in case you want to make additional analyses.
Everything is supported and maintained and new tools are added every year!
If we don’t have the analysis or tool you need, we’ll build it.