Automated Geospatial Watershed Assessment

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The Automated Geospatial Watershed Assessment (AGWA) tool has been developed under an interagency research agreement between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Research and Development, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service. AGWA is an assessment tool that uses widely available data to run two hydrologic models (KINEROS2 and SWAT). It was designed to be easily applied by managers and scientists to evaluate likely outcomes of management scenarios and rank different areas in a watershed in terms of likely consequences to change. It was also designed to perform watershed analyses over large areas such as entire basins and to evaluate problem areas at the subwatershed scale to include small communities or rural areas.  AGWA has been tested in a wide variety of watersheds, ranging from the deserts of southeast Arizona to the forested hills of upstate New York.

AGWA requires GIS data that are easily acquired and available free of charge throughout the United States. AGWA and its associated datafiles and documentation are available for download from our Web sites (listed below). Anyone with an Internet connection can download land cover, soils, and topographic data needed to run AGWA.

AGWA is available for both ArcGIS Desktop 9.x and ArcView 3.x software platforms. Minimum system requirements for both AGWA 2.0 for ArcGIS 9.x and AGWA 1.5 for ArcView 3.1+ are dictated by the minimum system requirements for their respective software platforms. DotAGWA, an Internet version of AGWA, is currently under development.

Both AGWA 2.0 and AGWA 1.5 share the same feature base, including advanced features such as: multiple outlet watershed discretization, parameterization and simulation; KINEROS riparian buffer simulation; SWAT hydrologic response units and water quality simulation; and nested watershed discretization. Additionally, AGWA 2.0 utilizes personal geodatabases offered in ArcGIS for derived GIS products versus the shapefiles used in AGWA 1.5.

AGWA has been successfully peer-reviewed by both the EPA and ARS protocols and is supported by technical manuals and a quality assurance/quality control report available via the Web sites.

For more information, visit our Web sites at:
http://www.epa.gov/nerlesd1/land-sci/agwa/index.htm
http://www.tucson.ars.ag.gov/agwa