Thornforest Hydrology & Water Quality
How have water quantity and quality changed across the lower Rio Grande region over the last 25 years — and do those changes line up with thornscrub restoration? These pages compile and explore publicly available hydrological and water-quality data for three South Texas HUC-8 watersheds, as part of the American Forests Thornforest project.
Three HUC-8 subbasins: South Laguna Madre (12110208), Los Olmos (13090001), and the Lower Rio Grande (13090002). Federal hydrography and monitoring data are US-only and stop at the international border; capturing the Mexican side of the basin is planned future work.
Every map is live — hover for details, use the toolbar to zoom and pan, and click legend entries to toggle layers on and off. Long data tables scroll within a fixed-height box (the header stays pinned). Code is hidden by default; click “Show code” to reveal it.
The notebooks
1 · USGS Hydrography
The spatial foundation: fetches the three HUC-8 watershed boundaries and maps them on an interactive topographic basemap.
2 · CONUS404 Climate
Fetches CONUS404 monthly climate output as a gridded datacube and derives the long-term water balance (precipitation, ET, runoff, recharge) and trends — per watershed and per grid cell — across the whole area, including the Mexican side.
3 · USGS WaterData
Discovers the USGS monitoring stations, records which priority parameters each measured, and fetches the time-series records (daily values, discrete samples, field measurements) with a data-availability summary.
4 · TCEQ Water Quality
Discovers Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) Surface Water Quality Monitoring stations via the EPA Water Quality Portal and fetches their results, classified into the same priority parameters.
5 · TWDB Groundwater
Discovers Texas Water Development Board (TWDB) Groundwater Database wells and fetches water-level and water-quality measurements from TWDB’s nightly bulk file.
Downloads
Every saved table is also compiled into a single Excel workbook per source — one sheet per table, with the header row and first column frozen and autofilter enabled on the headers:
Built with Quarto; data from the USGS Water Data APIs and the HyRiver toolset. Source on GitHub.