The National Hydrologic Geospatial Fabric Reference and Derived Hydrofabrics is a geospatial dataset of a network of connected rivers, lakes, and catchments used for hydrologic modeling. The dataset includes features and attributes representing hydrologic locations associated with observational data, cataloging, or reporting water data quantity or quality, and structures important to the storage and conveyance of surface water. It consists of one reference and three derived hydrofabrics designed to meet specific modeling needs with different levels of consolidation and aggregation of the reference features.
This child item contains features and attributes representing the National Hydrologic Geospatial Fabric Reference Hydrofabric. The Reference Hydrofabric is a hydrofabric that includes publicly-available hydrologic locations and points of interest (POIs), mainstem rivers, streams, catchments, and waterbodies linked with persistent identifiers, as well as network, topological, physical, and geometric feature attributes. The Reference Hydrofabric is intended as a base for deriving hydrofabrics to fit specific modeling purposes.

The item contains 21 Open Geospatial Consortium geopackages with reference features for 21 NHDPlus Vector Processing Units (reference_XX.gpkg), and one geopackage containing reference features for all of CONUS (reference_CONUS.gpkg). The Reference Hydrofabric is used to index hydrologic locations associated with observational data, catalog water data quantity or quality, and structurally important elements for storing and conveying surface water to a network of common hydrologic features. The Reference Hydrofabric provides the minimal features required for model fabric development and serves as a baseline for more detailed or aggregated network discretization for specific modeling purposes.