U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Southwestern Region (Region 3) Geospatial Data

    The Southwestern Region is 20.6 million acres. There are six national forests in Arizona, five national forests and a national grassland in New Mexico, and one national grassland each in Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle.The region ranges in elevation from 1,600 feet above sea level and an annual rain fall of 8 inches in Arizona's lower Sonoran Desert to 13,171-foot high Wheeler Peak and over 35 inches of precipitation a year in northern New Mexico.

    SWAT - Soil and Water Assessment Tool

      The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) is a public domain model jointly developed by USDA Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) and Texas A&M AgriLife Research, part of The Texas A&M University System. SWAT is a small watershed to river basin-scale model to simulate the quality and quantity of surface and ground water and predict the environmental impact of land use, land management practices, and climate change. SWAT is widely used in assessing soil erosion prevention and control, non-point source pollution control and regional management in watersheds.

      Data from: Shoot transcriptome of the giant reed, Arundo donax

        The giant reed, *Arundo donax*, is a perennial grass species that has become an invasive plant in many countries. To establish a foundational molecular dataset, an llumina Hi-Seq protocol was used to sequence the transcriptome of actively growing shoots from an invasive genotype collected along the Rio Grande River, bordering Texas and Mexico. The assembly of 27,491 high confidence transcripts (≥200 bp) are reported with at least 70% coverage of known genes in other Poaceae species.

        ARS Water Database

          The ARS Water Data Base is a collection of precipitation and streamflow data from small agricultural watersheds in the United States. This national archive of variable time-series readings for precipitation and runoff contains sufficient detail to reconstruct storm hydrographs and hyetographs. There are currently about 14,000 station years of data stored in the data base. Watersheds used as study areas range from 0.2 hectare (0.5 acres) to 12,400 square kilometers (4,786 square miles). Raingage networks range from one station per watershed to over 200 stations. The period of record for individual watersheds vary from 1 to 50 years. Some watersheds have been in continuous operation since the mid 1930's.

          Measured Annual Nutrient loads from AGricultural Environments (MANAGE) database

            The MANAGE (Measured Annual Nutrient loads from AGricultural Environments) database was developed to be a readily-accessible, easily-queried database of site characteristic and field-scale nutrient export data. Initial funding for MANAGE was provided by USDA-ARS to support the USDA Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP) and the Texas State Soil and Water Conservation Board as part of their mission to understand and mitigate agricultural impacts on water quality. MANAGE contains data from a vast majority of published peer-reviewed N and P export studies on homogeneous cultivated, pasture/range, and forested land uses in the US under natural rainfall-runoff conditions, as well as artificially drained agricultural land. Thus MANAGE facilitates expanded spatial analyses and improved understanding of regional differences, management practice effectiveness, and impacts of land use conversions and management techniques, and it provides valuable data for modeling and decision-making related to agricultural runoff.