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Watershed delineation is the process of identifying the boundary of a watershed, also referred to as a catchment, drainage basin, or river basin.It is an important step in many areas of environmental science, engineering, and management, for example to study flooding, aquatic habitat, or water pollution.
Drainage basin of the Ohio River, part of the Mississippi River drainage basin. In hydrology, the drainage basin is a logical unit of focus [clarification needed] for studying the movement of water within the hydrological cycle. The process of finding a drainage boundary is referred to as watershed delineation. Finding the area and extent of a ...
Limnology includes the study of the drainage basin, movement of water through the basin and biogeochemical changes that occur en route. A more recent sub-discipline of limnology, termed landscape limnology , studies, manages, and seeks to conserve these ecosystems using a landscape perspective, by explicitly examining connections between an ...
The Atlantic Seaboard basin in eastern North America drains to the Atlantic Ocean; the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence basin in central and eastern North America drains to the Gulf of St. Lawrence on the Atlantic Ocean or to the Labrador Sea; the Gulf of Mexico basin in the southern United States drains to the Gulf of Mexico, a basin of the Atlantic ...
It includes drainage basins which do not flow to the ocean (endorheic basins). It includes oceanic sea drainage basins which have hydrologically coherent areas (oceanic seas are set by IHO convention). The oceans drain approximately 83% of the land in the world. The other 17% – an area larger than the basin of the Arctic Ocean – drains to ...
Dendritic drainage: the Yarlung Tsangpo River, Tibet, seen from space: snow cover has melted in the valley system. In geomorphology, drainage systems, also known as river systems, are the patterns formed by the streams, rivers, and lakes in a particular drainage basin. They are governed by the topography of land, whether a particular region is ...
Stream order is an important aspect of a drainage basin. It is defined as the measure of the position of a stream in the hierarchy of streams. Tributaries are given a number one greater than that of the river or stream into which they discharge. So, for example, all immediate tributaries of the main stem are given the number "2".
The Mississippi River, which is the drainage area for 41% of the continental United States, dumps high-nutrient runoff such as nitrates and phosphorus into the Gulf of Mexico. According to a 2009 fact sheet created by NOAA, "seventy percent of nutrient loads that cause hypoxia are a result of this vast drainage basin".