Development of a National Reservoir Database of Geographical, Physical, and Morphological Metrics for Classification and Discrimination for Fisheries Habitat Assessment

Several databases of national scale were compiled to develop a database of reservoir morphological parameters including, but not limited to shoreline development index, index of basin permanence, and development of volume based on established morphometric formulas. The new reservoir morphological database (RMD) contains physical, chemical and morphological characteristics of major reservoirs with surface area greater than or equal to 250 acres (100 hectares); smaller lakes (< 250 acres) were excluded from this study. The use of geographical information systems (GIS), Microsoft Access and the statistical package JMP 10 aided in the RMD development. The RMD contains approximately 3,800 publicly accessible reservoirs from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers National Inventory of Dams (NID) joined with waterbodies from the USGS National Hydrography Dataset (NHD). Once the NID and the NHD were combined, they were intersected with the USGS Enhanced Riverreach File (ERF1_2). The intersecting of the ERF1_2 with the combined NID-NHD database enabled the connection of the USGS Spatially Referenced Regressions on Watershed attributes model and the completion of the RMD. The RMD will assist natural resource managers in assessing reservoir characteristics in the continental United States.