Assessment of hydrologic alteration at 12-digit hydrologic unit code (HUC12) pour points in the southeastern United States, 1950 - 2009

Two methods of calculating hydrologic alteration were applied to modeled daily streamflow data for 9,201 12-digit hydrologic unit code (HUC12) pour points draining to the Gulf of Mexico (Robinson and others, 2020). The first method is a new modified method of calculating ecosurplus and ecodeficit called hydro change. For this project, ecosurplus and ecodeficit have been combined to assess overall hydrologic regime change. The second method is the confidence interval hypothesis test (Kroll and others, 2015). The first method is a means of quantifying hydrologic alteration while the second is a hypothesis test to simply determine if statistically significant alteration has occurred. Both methods are employed to determine which is the best at analyzing alteration of the hydrologic regime in the Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council (RESTORE) study area. Statistical analysis was done in RStudio (2020).

The data release includes four attached files: (1) metadata .xml file, (2) csv with the p-values for each HUC12, (3) csv with results from the hydrologic change analysis, and (4) the shapefile of the pour point locations for the HUC12s used in the analyses.