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Molly A Maupin

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The Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-11) was passed into law on March 30, 2009. Sub-title F of the law, also known as the SECURE (Science and Engineering to Comprehensively Understand and Responsibly Enhance) Water Act, calls for the establishment of a “national water availability and use assessment program” in the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The recommendation for a national assessment of the available water resources was driven by the lack of such an assessment since 1978. In fulfillment of the Act, the USGS developed the National Water Census (NWC), under the auspices of the USGS Water Availability and Use Program, and as part of that activity, among others, collected water withdrawal...
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This dataset contains water-use estimates for 2015 that are aggregated to the county level in the United States. The U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS's) National Water Use Science Project is responsible for compiling and disseminating the Nation's water-use data. Working in cooperation with local, State, and Federal agencies, the USGS has published an estimate of water use in the United States every 5 years, beginning in 1950. Water-use estimates aggregated to the State level are presented in USGS Circular 1441, "Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2015" (Dieter and others, 2018). This dataset contains the county-level water-use data that support the state-level estimates in Dieter and others 2018. This...
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Water in the United States is used for myriad activities on a daily basis, such as for food (irrigation, aquaculture, livestock), energy (thermoelectric power or hydropower generation), and public water supply for domestic, commercial or industrial purposes. Yet, we lack an national accounting of how and where water is used on a temporal scale more frequent than every 5 years, and a spatial scale greater than county level. The “water data drought” in the U.S. and globally is one of the key barriers inhibiting our understanding of how the environment sustains society and how society alters the environment. The world’s best mesoscale water use dataset is the USGS Water-Use report (the so-called “water census”), which...
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