Abstract

Alternative method for automatic coding of stream order
Track: Water Resources
Authors: Gido Langen, Jerry Griffith

Knowledge of stream order is necessary for appropriate watershed management techniques, and a new method for automating stream order in digital hydrographic data sets is presented here. This approach uses ArcGIS, and its relational database technology along with structured query language (SQL) to automatically code a digital hydrographic database to Strahler stream order. The procedure was successfully tested in ArcGIS on a hydrographic ArcGIS database from the Province of Alberta, Canada containing nearly one million stream segments. The method ran error-free using significantly less processing time than other alternative approaches, and can readily be applied to other stream data sets. Both the complete Python code and complete SQL code are included in the paper's appendix.