rabpro: global watershed boundaries, river elevation profiles, and catchment statistics

Abstract

River and Basin Profiler (rabpro) is a Python package to delineate watersheds, extract river flowlines and elevation profiles, and compute watershed statistics for any location on the Earth's surface. As fundamental hydrologically-relevant units of surface area, watersheds are areas of land that drain via aboveground pathways to the same location, or outlet. Delineations of watershed boundaries are typically performed on digital elevation models (DEMs) that represent surface elevations as gridded rasters. Depending on the resolution of the DEM and the size of the watershed, delineation may be very computationally expensive. With this in mind, we designed rabpro to provide user-friendly workflows to manage the complexity and computational expense of watershed calculations given an arbitrary coordinate pair. In addition to basic watershed delineation, rabpro will extract the elevation profile for a watershed's mainchannel flowline. This enables the computation of river slope, which is a critical parameter in many hydrologic and geomorphologic models. Finally, rabpro provides a user-friendly wrapper around Google Earth Engine's (GEE) Python API to enable cloud-computing of zonal watershed statistics and/or time-varying forcing data from hundreds of available datasets. Altogether, rabpro provides the ability to automate or semi-automate complex watershed analysis workflows across broad spatial extents.

Scale‐Dependent Influence of Permafrost on Riverbank Erosion Rates

“…Few bank erosion studies reported bankfull or maximum discharges, and many of the rivers in both our Arctic and meta‐analysis of published erosion rates are ungauged or lack reliable stream flow data for the reaches of interest. Therefore, we extracted the long‐term average (1960–2015) of the FLO1K annual maximum monthly discharge (Barbarossa et al., 2018) using the Python package rabpro (Schwenk et al., 2022) https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.04237. The annual maximum monthly discharge captures both geomorphically relevant discharges that occur for sufficient durations to be effective and avoids biases of short‐lived outliers potentially captured in the annual maximum daily discharge.…”

“…Second, where available, we used the reported slopes from the global data set of Lin et al (2020). Finally, we used the rabpro software (Schwenk et al, 2022) https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.04237 to calculate slope along reaches where data were unavailable from the other data sources. The errors associated with slope estimates are discussed in Supporting Information S1 (Text S2).…”

“…Data sets include global compilation of published erosion, https://data.ess-dive.lbl.gov/view/doi:10.15485/1571181 (Rowland & Schwenk, 2019); binary channel masks of Arctic rivers analyzed, https://data.ess-dive.lbl.gov/datasets/doi:10.15485/1571525 (Rowland & Stauffer, 2019a), erosion, accretion, and planform metrics of arctic rivers, https://data.ess-dive.lbl.gov/datasets/doi:10.15485/1571527 (Rowland & Stauffer, 2019b); bank temperature measurements measured on Selawik and Koyukuk Rivers, https://data.ess-dive.lbl.gov/datasets/doi:10.15485/1922885, (Rowland et al., 2023); and observations and map of permafrost along the Koyukuk River, https://data.ess-dive.lbl.gov/datasets/doi:10.15485/1922517, (Schwenk et al., 2023). The rabpro software can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.04237, (Schwenk et al., 2022).…”

Scale-dependent influence of permafrost on riverbank erosion rates

“…Few bank erosion studies reported bankfull or maximum discharges, and many of the rivers in both our Arctic and meta-analysis of published erosion rates are ungauged or lack reliable stream flow data for the reaches of interest. Therefore, we extracted the long-term average (1960 -2015) of the FLO1K annual maximum monthly discharge (Barbarossa et al, 2018) using the Python package rabpro (J Schwenk et al, 2022). The annual maximum monthly captures both geomorphically relevant discharges that occur for sufficient durations to be effective and avoids biases of short-lived outliers potentially captured in the annual maximum daily discharge.…”

Recent streamflow trends across permafrost basins of North America

“…To compute basin characteristics needed for gage selection and analysis (e.g., permafrost coverage, topographic slope, aspect, and others) we used the River and Basin Profiler (rabpro, Schwenk et al, 2022). Rabpro automatically delineates watersheds by snapping gage points to appropriate MERIT-Hydro (Yamazaki et al, 2019) flowlines and performing digital-elevation model-based pixeltracing to identify all pixels draining to the snapped location.…”