Data to Assess Nitrogen Export from Forested Watersheds in and near the Long Island Sound Basin with Weighted Regressions on Time, Discharge, and Season (WRTDS)

The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Long Island Sound Study (https://longislandsoundstudy.net), characterized nitrogen export from forested watersheds and whether nitrogen loading has been increasing or decreasing to help inform Long Island Sound management strategies. The Weighted Regressions on Time, Discharge, and Season (WRTDS; Hirsch and others, 2010) method was used to estimate annual concentrations and fluxes of nitrogen species using long-term records (14 to 37 years in length) of stream total nitrogen, dissolved organic nitrogen, nitrate, and ammonium concentrations and daily discharge data from 17 watersheds located in the Long Island Sound basin or in nearby areas of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, or New York. This data release contains the input water-quality and discharge data, annual outputs (including concentrations, fluxes, yields, and confidence intervals about these estimates), statistical tests for trends between the periods of water years 1999-2000 and 2016-2018, and model diagnostic statistics. These datasets are organized into one zip file (WRTDSeLists.zip) and six comma-separated values (csv) data files (StationInformation.csv, AnnualResults.csv, TrendResults.csv, ModelStatistics.csv, InputWaterQuality.csv, and InputStreamflow.csv). The csv file (StationInformation.csv) contains information about the stations and input datasets. Finally, a short R script (SampleScript.R) is included to facilitate viewing the input and output data and to re-run the model.

Reference:
Hirsch, R.M., Moyer, D.L., and Archfield, S.A., 2010, Weighted Regressions on Time, Discharge, and Season (WRTDS), with an application to Chesapeake Bay River inputs: Journal of the American Water Resources Association, v. 46, no. 5, p. 857–880.