Valley bottom extraction tool results for Colorado River Basin

Valley bottoms are representative of the "maximum riparian corridor extent", an area which separates the vegetative, topographic, and environmental characteristics of riparian areas from those of the upland. The Valley Bottom Extraction Tool (V-BET) (Gilbert et al., 2016), a freely available ArcMap Toolbox, was used to map valley bottoms across the Colorado River Basin. The V-BET tool requires two primary data inputs: a high resolution (≤10 m2) digital elevation model and hydrologic flowline data with high cartographic precision. The hydrologic flow line data was obtained from the National Hydrography Dataset and a 10-meter digital elevation model from the National Elevation Dataset. The study area was separated into 149 distinct hydrological unit codes (HUCs) at the HUC-8 level and processed each HUC independently within the V-BET toolbox in ArcMap v10.3. Resulting valley bottom extents, which are output from the tool as polygon files, were qualitatively verified by trained interpreters and edited (mainly streams and rivers equal to Strahler stream order "3") manually in a geographic information system to remove any superfluous channels or over/under estimations of extent using the refinement and editing process detailed in Gilbert et al. (2016). This zip file contains two versions of the Valley bottom extraction tool results for the Colorado River Basin; one as a raster version and another as a polygon shapefile.