Water Feature Names
I was curious after a conversation with fellow geographer, David Starnes, what the frequency of descriptors (which I call classes for the purpose of this analysis) like stream, creek, branch, prong, fork, etc. are regionally. I did some analysis, and here are some tables of what I found. Details of the analysis follow the tables. I very well could have called this "Hierarchical Water Feature Name Frequency using GNIS in the NHD Regions 5 and 6" but opted for a more user friendly title given my audience. For this analysis I utilized the National Hydrography Dataset (NHD) which gets names for features from the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS). I joined NHD data to the NHD Plus data to get stream order information, which for the lay user could be considered a measure of the size of the stream. Since I was interested in changes in the descriptors of smaller water features grading upwards to larger water features, stream order was the easiest measure to ...