This companion document to the 2020 Mississippi River report card contains information about data sources for all indicators, summary of analysis methods, and scoring details for each of the six America’s Watershed Initiative goals, and for two watershed wide indicators. Additional information regarding the goals is included to provide greater detail and discussion than is possible in the report card document.

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Stream network density exerts a strong influence on ecohydrologic processes in watersheds, yet existing stream maps fail to capture most headwater streams and therefore underestimate stream density. Furthermore, discrepancies between mapped and actual stream length vary between watersheds, confounding efforts to understand the impacts of land use on stream ecosystems.

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Channel heads are the beginning of river networks and thus knowing their location is important in assessing water resources and health threats to fluvial ecosystems. Despite their importance, most channel heads are unmapped. Remote sensing technologies have not yet proven effective under forested canopies, suggesting that predictive models of channel head locations are the best solution to the impracticality of field-mapping the millions of these features that exist in the U.S. alone.

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The timing of spring leaf development, trajectories of summer leaf area, and the timing of autumn senescence have profound impacts to the water, carbon, and energy balance of ecosystems, and are likely influenced by global climate change. Limited field-based and remote-sensing observations have suggested complex spatial patterns related to geographic features that influence climate.

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For many studies of urbanization, particularly those covering broad spatial extents and thus requiring the perspective afforded by satellite remote sensing, the longest time series of impervious surface area (ISA) initiate with the availability of Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) data in the mid 1980s.

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