Commercial Waterways

This dataset represents the Great Lakes basin extent of the National Waterway Network (NWN), a nationwide GIS network of navigable waterways used for commercial shipping and transportation analysis. The network supports studies of navigation performance, compilation of commodity-flow statistics, routing, and mapping. The network includes shipping channels, rivers, Intracoastal Waterways, sealanes, and representative routes across open water where no formally defined shipping path exists. It also includes network nodes representing locations such as ports, intermodal facilities, river confluences, and other points used for routing and analysis. The National Waterway Network was developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Vanderbilt University with input from the National Waterway GIS Design Committee and several federal agencies, including the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Department of Transportation. The network incorporates the USACE Waterway Link Network along with additional links and nodes added to better represent commercial shipping patterns. Source data were compiled from multiple datasets and map scales. Most inland waterways were derived from 1:100,000-scale U.S. Geological Survey data, while offshore routes were derived from NOAA navigational charts at varying scales. Positional accuracy therefore varies across the network, particularly between inland, harbor, and open-water areas.