Watersheds influence the rivers that drain them, and all receiving water bodies further downstream. Problems and solutions to many concerns in aquatic environments are often best mitigated through understanding the watersheds which exist upstream.

Baird & Associates have completed many watershed-based investigations in recent years. Most of these projects involved the development, testing, application and transfer of customized software systems to local stakeholders to support watershed management. In many cases these projects have focused on an inventory of all sediment sources and sinks within watersheds and the ability to evaluate changes to sediment production, transport and fate processes caused by changes to land use and/or the form of the water course.

The typical components of the watershed systems that have been developed by Baird include:

• GIS for data management;
• input/output exchange between GIS and numerical model components;
• hydrologic (rainfall/runoff) often with sediment production;
• hydraulic or hydrodynamic models including 1D, 2D and 3D numerical models
• models to describe sediment transport and related erosion/deposition;
• In-house software for data management, spatial analysis and visualization including XVision, Spatial Data Analyzer and MapAnimator3D