Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Watershed and micro-watershed delineation underlies a wide range of water security and land management decisions; yet existing global hydrographic products such as HydroSHEDS are static, coarser, and not readily reproducible or adaptable to new regions or scales. We present Hydro Stack, an open-source, end-to-end workflow that automates micro-watershed delineation and hydrological characterization for any user-supplied area of interest. Given only a boundary vector, the pipeline resolves the appropriate projection, acquires and conditions elevation data, delineates micro-watersheds via a hydrologically consistent basin-merging procedure, and derives a unified set of layers, such as natural depressions, drainage networks with stream ordering, pour points, specific catchment area, catchment-level stream order, and inter-basin drainage connectivity. Built mostly on GRASS GIS and released as a containerized, script based pipeline, Hydro Stack makes every step of the analysis transparent, reconfigurable, and reproducible, providing a generalized foundation for local-level hydrological planning.
DOI: 10.31223/x51827
Authors: Shubham Kumar, Aaditeshwar Seth
Institution: Indian Institute of Technology Delhi
Language: English
Subfield: Environmental Engineering
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225043533