MacroSheds: a synthesis of long-term biogeochemical, hydroclimatic, and geospatial data from small watershed ecosystem studies

The MacroSheds dataset is an ongoing synthesis of data records from small-watershed ecosystem studies, including those managed by LTER, CZO/CZNet, US Forest Service, and many other networks. While details of instrumentation and sampling methods vary across these studies, the types of data collected and the questions that motivate their analysis are remarkably similar. Nevertheless, little effort toward the compilation of these datasets has previously been made, and comparative watershed analyses have remained limited in scale. The MacroSheds dataset includes daily time series of streamflow (discharge) and stream chemistry, as well as precipitation and precipitation chemistry where available. Each of the 169+ watersheds included in the MacroSheds dataset is described by a comprehensive collection of watershed attributes, summarized from a diverse set of gridded data products. A subset of these watershed attributes conform as closely as possible to the specifications of the CAMELS dataset (https://ral.ucar.edu/solutions/products/camels), allowing the MacroSheds dataset to function as a small-watershed supplement to that corpus, and a resource for hydrologists as well as biogeochemists and watershed ecosystem scientists. The MacroSheds dataset is accompanied by a web dashboard for visualization (macrosheds.org) and an R package (https://github.com/MacroSHEDS/macrosheds) for data access and analysis. Updates to each of these resources will occur annually on approximately February 1. Code used to generate this dataset is managed on GitHub (https://github.com/MacroSHEDS/data_processing). Questions may be directed to [e-mail].