The two dashboards below let you explore and compare annual precipitation across the watershed, and hillslope runoff and soil loss year to year or between multiple watersheds. Data is available for the 67 agricultural counties in Minnesota for 2008 through 2024. The data shows runoff and soil loss from hill slopes, not the amount of discharge or cumulative sediment loading from the watershed.
Dashboard 1 - Maps (below): Explore spatial and temporal trends of annual precipitation, runoff, and soil loss at the scale of HUC8 or HUC12 watersheds.
Dashboard 2 - Bar charts (below): Compare metrics for multiple HUC12 watersheds.
Data source: The dashboards use data from the Daily Erosion Project (DEP v20250214), a collaboration between Iowa State University and the University of Minnesota. The DEP estimates daily runoff and mass of soil transported from individual hillslopes (erosion), reporting these values daily and publicly at the USGS Hydrological Unit Code (HUC) 12 spatial resolution.
Funding and development: The dashboards were developed by the University of Minnesota’s Department of Soil, Water, and Climate as part of the broader project, "Assessing Soil Residue Cover, Cover Crops, and Erosion using Remote Sensing and Modeling," funded by the Minnesota Board of Water and Soil Resources through the Clean Water Fund of the Clean Water, Land & Legacy Amendment. The purpose of the larger project is to develop a long-term program to systematically collect ground truth data concerning crop residue cover in spring and cover crop emergence in fall in order to train remote sensing imagery models for better estimation of trends in the adoption of soil conserving practices. These estimates are then used in the DEP to better predict daily soil erosion on agricultural landscapes in Minnesota. The remote sensing imagery is available on the MOSH remote sensing page.
View the step-by-step user guide (pdf).
Please note that results may change as DEP upgrades to new versions. DEP is continuously being developed, and past years' data will be updated periodically. Users accept the data as is and assume all risks associated with its use. For more detailed temporal information about your specific watershed of interest, please use the DEP interactive map.
If you have technical questions, need support, or are interested in other project outputs, please contact:
Eduardo Luquin
David Mulla