National Hydro Network (NHN)

The National Hydro Network (NHN) focuses on providing a quality geometric description and a set of basic attributes describing Canada's inland surface waters. It provides geospatial digital data compliant with the NHN Standard such as lakes, reservoirs, watercourses (rivers and streams), canals, islands, drainage linear network, toponyms or geographical names, constructions and obstacles related to surface waters, etc. The best available federal and provincial data are used for its production, which is done jointly by the federal and interested provincial and territorial partners. The NHN is created from existing data at the 1:50 000 scale or better. The NHN data have a great potential for analysis, cartographic representation and display and will serve as base data in many applications.
The NHN data are distributed by watershed, known as the NHN Work Unit Limits. Data are available in multiple formats (.shp,.gdb,.gml,.kml). For each data format,  individual features of the NHN data are packaged by NHN Work Unit. Each file names contains the NHN Work Unit identifier information (e.g., "02gha00"). Download tips: First download the NHN watershed boundary and identify the watersheds of your interest. Find out the NHN Work Unit Identifier for the interested watersheds ( under the field name "DATASETNAM") and use that information to download the packaged NHN data.