Merge Stream Reach with Water Bodies Tool

Next we’ll go over how to run the Merge Stream Reach with Water Bodies tool. This is an optional tool that merges your stream reach with any water bodies you have in your watershed. By doing so, you can include lake shores, river banks, and other shoreline features in the riparian assessment processing.

When water body features, such as wide rivers or lakes, are merged with your stream reach, a new stream reach feature class is created and, optionally, a new polygon feature class is output for your water bodies, which may be useful if there are both wide rivers and lakes in your watershed.

You will have the option to use these feature classes in later tools, such as the riparian assessment suite, to include these waterbody boundaries for citing criteria. This tool uses the boundaries of lakes and wide-river features as bank lines.

Note: When using water body features, be certain that the water body boundaries fully encompass the stream segments flowing through them.

Tool Summary

Inputs:

1. Stream Reach (StreamReach + inHUC) (Required)
2. D8 Flow Accumulation raster (D8FlowAcc + inHUC) (Required)
3. Lake polygon (Optional)
4. Wide River polygon (Optional)
   

Outputs:

1. Stream Reach with Water Bodies (StreamReachWB + inHUC)
2. Waterbodies (Optional)

For more details on how to run this tool, please view this video (runtime 7:45):