What is the Watershed Health Assessment Framework?

The Watershed Health Assessment Framework (WHAF) is a structured, science-based approach to help resource professionals and citizens work together and grow our common understanding of Minnesota's complex natural resource systems that interact within a watershed boundary.

The WHAF brings together current data and scientific analysis to generate information about Minnesota's watersheds. These products are delivered in a transparent and repeatable framework to foster robust conversations and innovative approaches for improving the health of Minnesota's watersheds and communities.

WHAF highlights

Suite of applications

Each application focuses on summarizing data in ways that give more insight into Minnesota's natural resource systems.

WHAF: Explorer

  • Access watershed health scores, GIS data, basemaps, and watershed boundaries.
  • Tools in the map let you view data, compare health scores, link to charts and download reports for a robust evaluation of watershed health.
  • With one-click, the "scale" tool reveals the watershed boundaries that influence a location, from local to large river basin, helping users explore the relationship between health and watershed location.

WHAF: Land Cover

  • Summarize land cover, crop cover and cropping history at different scales. Explore charts of changes in water use and available water over time. Download charts for sharing or further analysis.

WHAF: Lakes

  • Compare lake health scores across a county or watershed, and then dive into specifics about the health of each lake.
These applications work together and can help paint a robust picture of interactions that have an impact on ecological health in your neighborhood and

Ecological health scores

Ecological health scores simplify and compare a range of resource conditions.

  • By creating science-based health scores, anyone can view a range of ecological health conditions across Minnesota. Data is collected from various sources to create a suite of scores. The same 0 to 100 (red to green) scale is used to deliver all the scores. Five ecological components organize the hierarchy of scores to share different aspects of system health.

Key concepts

System science concepts underpin how watersheds are managed as ecological systems. Several important key concepts drive the format and delivery of all aspects of the Watershed Health Assessment Framework.

  • Highlighted key concepts include health, scale, complexity and resilience. WHAF Use Examples provide resource management scenarios that apply these key concepts to different aspects of managing for watershed health.

Back to top