Surf Your Watershed
What is a Watershed?
It's the area of land that catches rain and snow and drains or seeps into a marsh, stream, river, lake or groundwater.
Why Watersheds?
No Matter Where You live ... You live in a Watershed - Site Provided by Conservation Technology Information Centers (CTIC). Includes videos, why you should care, and watershed friendly quiz. 
Surf Your Watershed's Definition of a Watershed
Hydrologic Unit Codes (HUC)
Watersheds are delineated by USGS using a nationwide system based on surface hydrologic features. This system divides the country into 21 regions, 222 subregions, 352 accounting units, and 2,262 cataloguing units. A hierarchical hydrologic unit code (HUC) consisting of 2 digits for each level in the hydrologic unit system is used to identify any hydrologic area. The 6 digit accounting units and the 8 digit cataloguing units are generally referred to as basin and sub-basin. It is defined as the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) and generally serves as the backbone for the country's hydrologic delineation. A watershed in Surf Your Watershed is the 8 digit cataloging unit.
The USEPA Reach Files are a series of hydrologic databases of the surface waters of the continental United States and Hawaii. The Reach Files are organized by USGS Cataloging Units.
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