North American Lake-River Routing Product v 2.1, derived by BasinMaker GIS Toolbox

Thank you for your interest in our lake-river routing product. Please go to this website to download and learn more about the Routing product and BasinMaker. 

In your publication using the version 2.1 of the routing product, please cite the following paper:

BasinMaker: a GIS toolbox for distributed watershed delineation of complex lake and river routing networks. Han, M., H. Shen, B. A. Tolson, J. R. Craig, J. Mai, S. Lin, N. Basu, F. Awol, submitted April 2021 to Environmental Modelling and Software.

(But please also check Basin Maker website where you downloaded this for most up to date citation)

Note that version 1.0 of this product covered only Canada and used a different DEM and is described in the following paper:

Han, M., J. Mai, B. A. Tolson, J. R. Craig, E. Gaborit, H. Liu, K. Lee, Subwatershed-based lake and river routing products for hydrologic and land surface models applied over Canada, Canadian Water Resources Journal, 45(3), doi.org/10.1080/07011784.2020.1772116.

The lake-river routing product provides a routing structure (which here refers to both the topology of the stream network and the contributing areas to individual lakes and stream reaches), to correctly represent lakes and be easily customized based on various user requirements.

BasinMaker, which is a GIS toolbox to delineate watersheds with lakes, was used to develop this routing product. In this routing product, each lake is represented by a lake catchment. A lake catchment is defined by the following rules:1) The extent of the lake catchment will fully cover the lake; 2) the outlet of the lake catchment is the same as the outlet of the lake; 3) each lake’s inlets are treated as a catchment outlet. In this way, both inflow and outflow of each lake can be explicitly simulated by hydrologic routing models.

Support for BasinMaker and the North American routing product development came from multiple sources: 

• Primary graduate student support for BasinMaker contributors was provided by NRCan/Canadian Forest Service G&C Grants #129677 and #129816 and Dr. Tolson's NSERC Discovery Grant.
• Secondary preliminary graduate student support for BasinMaker first author Ming Han was provided by Canada First Research Excellence Fund provided to the Lake Futures project of the Global Water Futures Project.
• Some additional secondary support was also provided via the CANARIE research software program, grant #RS3-124 to co-author Juliane Mai.