National Hydro Network - NHN - GeoBase Series

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 Work Unit Limits were created based on Water Survey of Canada Sub-Sub-Drainage Area.

Data and Resources

Additional Info

Field Value
Last Updated January 16, 2026, 20:47 (UTC)
Created January 16, 2026, 20:47 (UTC)
contains_pii non
crisis_categories Fortes pluies
criticality_level Faible
data_formats FGDB/GDB; GML; GPKG; KMZ; PDF; SHP; WMS
fair_openness Level 2 - Machine-readable
geographic_scope Canada
sensitivity_level Faible
source_inventaire Inventaire_W
source_url https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/a4b190fe-e090-4e6d-881e-b87956c07977
subject form_descriptors, nature_and_environment, science_and_technology
update_frequency as_needed
year_most_recent 2022-11-07 15:40:06.594000
year_start 2017-04-28 19:50:03.701000