FHWA Webninar on adding roads to the USGS StreamStats application, September 23, 2021
Channel: Stormwater Runoff
Date: 2021-09-27

This video is a recording of the FHWA Webninar on adding roads to the USGS StreamStats Application in southern New England on September 23, 2021.  This presentation describes our efforts to update basin characteristics in the StreamStats application in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. This work was done to support stormwater-runoff analyses with the Stochastic empirical loading and dilution model (SELDM), but the results also provide information for other hydrological, hydraulic, and environmental decision-making needs. This work was completed in cooperation with the Federal Highway Administration and the Departments of Transportation in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. The information and data we will discuss today are available in the on-line StreamStats application for each of these States. 

In this presentation we will discuss the new roadway data for stream stats in southern New England. We'll also look at the physiographic and  anthropogenic properties of basins upstream of intersections of roads and streams, which we will describe as road crossings. We'll briefly touch on the potential uses for these data. And we'll also step through the process for delineating a basin and retrieving roadway data and other basin properties in StreamStats. The new transportation basin properties in stream stats are the length of roads by category and the number of road crossings by category. We delineated basins, from all road crossings that were identified in southern New England and characterized these basins with respect to the pertinent properties that were just described. 53,131 road crossings were identified in southern New England. However, because delineation of, and determining basin characteristics for very small drainage areas is highly uncertain, we applied criteria in order to subset meaningful basins for analysis. Only basins with a minimum drainage area of 0.025 square miles or 16 acres were selected. We also limited basins to those with a main channel length, mean basin slope, and stream density greater than zero, where the stream density is defined as the total length of streams divided by drainage area. This left us with 48,466 basins upstream of road crossings, analyzing these basins allowed us to learn a lot about stream basins in southern new England with respect to roadway characteristics and other basin properties. 

See our website for more information
https://www.usgs.gov/SELDM

and/or the on-line StreamStats application at:
https://streamstats.usgs.gov/ss/