Red-Assiniboine Basin SPARROW Model Development Technical Document

Report written by R. W. Jenkinson (National Research Council of Canada) and G. A. Benoy (International Joint Commission)

Many watersheds straddle the border between Canada and the United States. Through the International Joint Commission’s (IJC) International Watersheds Initiative (IWI), the Spatially-Referenced Regressions on Watershed attributes (SPARROW) model, developed by the US Geological Survey (USGS), was applied to the binational Red and Assiniboine River basins, which span portions of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota. The impetus for this novel application was to better understand and quantify the sources of nutrients, in particular phosphorus, that contribute to the eutrophication of Lake Winnipeg.