MacroSheds: Enabling Continental-scale Comparison of Watershed Biogeochemistry

Hundreds of individual datasets, covering many decades and diverse geographies, document watershed chemistry and stream-flow measurements throughout the United States. However, capacity for cross-watershed comparison has remained limited, due to idiosyncrasies in data format, housing, and access. The MacroSheds project has developed a flexible, future-friendly system for continually harmonizing daily time series of streamflow, precipitation, and solute chemistry from 168+ watershed studies across the U.S., and supplementing each with a comprehensive set of predictive watershed attributes. The MacroSheds dataset is accompanied by a web portal (macrosheds.org) for visual exploration, and an R package (macrosheds) to aid with analysis. Together, these tools enable the search for general principles describing functional capacity and behavior across watersheds.