Livestock water-use withdrawal estimates for 2022 by 12-digit hydrologic unit code, county, month, and year for the United States, excluding territories

This data release provides monthly and annual 2022 livestock water-use withdrawal estimates by 12-digit hydrologic unit code watershed (HUC12) and by county. The estimates are for the United States excluding territories. Estimates for groundwater, surface-water, and total withdrawals are provided separately in units of million gallons per day. The data are provided in comma-separated values (CSV) format. Additionally, a text file is provided that lists the water use coefficients for each animal type by state, expressed in gallons per day. These coefficients were used to compute the water use withdrawal estimates following the methods developed by Lovelace (2009).
          
HUC12 boundaries are routinely updated, and newer versions of the dataset may include boundary changes, spatial adjustments, and potential attribute updates. The livestock water-use withdrawal estimates in this dataset will be used for multiple projects; therefore, the estimates are provided for two versions of the HUC12 boundaries. The first version, which was published by Luukkonen and others (2024), is referred to as “huc12a.” The second version, which was published by Blodgett (2023), is referred to as “huc12b.”Livestock water-use withdrawal estimates are provided for the huc12a boundaries to enable integration of the livestock estimates with irrigation (Haynes and others, 2024), public supply (Luukkonen and others, 2024), and thermoelectric power (Galanter and others, 2024) water-use model estimates for the USGS Water Availability and Use Science Program. Livestock water-use withdrawal estimates are provided for the huc12b boundaries to provide consistency in data delivery for the USGS Integrated Water Availability Assessment (IWAAS) products.  
 
huc12a = Luukkonen and others, 2024 (Water Use Program) - This feature class is the National watershed boundary (HUC12) dataset for the conterminous United States that was retrieved on 10/26/2020. This feature class is available at https://doi.org/10.5066/P9FUL880.
 
huc12b = Blodgett 2023 (Integrated Water Availability Assessments) - This second version of the HUC12 feature class is a modified version of the NHDPlusV2 snapshot of the Watershed Boundary Dataset to include additional attributes. This feature class is available at https://doi.org/10.5066/P92U7ZUT.      

 

li_huc12b_tot_2022_mgd.csv - a CSV file with estimated monthly livestock total water use in 2022 by HUC12 (Blodgett, 2023) in million gallons per day.
li_huc12b_sw_2022_mgd.csv - a CSV file with estimated monthly livestock surface water use in 2022 by HUC12 (Blodgett, 2023) in million gallons per day.
li_huc12b_gw_2022_mgd.csv - a CSV file with estimated monthly livestock groundwater use in 2022 by HUC12 (Blodgett, 2023) in million gallons per day.
li_county_tot_2022_mgd.csv – a CSV file with estimated monthly livestock total water use in 2022 by County in million gallons per day.
li_county_sw_2022_mgd.csv – a CSV file with estimated monthly livestock surface water use in 2022 by County in million gallons per day.
li_county_gw_2022_mgd.csv – a CSV file with estimated monthly livestock groundwater use in 2022 by County in million gallons per day.
li_huc12a_tot_2022_mgd.csv - a CSV file with estimated monthly livestock total water use in 2022 by HUC12 (Luukkonen and others, 2024) in million gallons per day.
li_huc12a_sw_2022_mgd.csv – a CSV file with estimated monthly livestock surface water use in 2022 by HUC12 (Luukkonen and others, 2024) in million gallons per day.
li_huc12a_gw_2022_mgd.csv – a CSV file with estimated monthly livestock groundwater use in 2022 by HUC12 (Luukkonen and others, 2024) in million gallons per day.
LivestockCoefficientsAndDataSources.txt – a text file containing the coefficients of water use per animal type per day along with the source or sources of the coefficients.