The National Hydro Network (NHN) includes:
- geospatial data features representing lakes, reservoirs, rivers, streams, canals and islands
- a linear network, showing the directional flow of surface water and structured by watershed
- place names (geographical names) associated with NHN features
The spatial resolution of the data is approximately 1:50 000 (... some of it was created at larger scales such as 1:10,000 and 1:20,000) and should suffice for most projects that requires hydrographic information. If you are creating large scale maps then you may want to check the regional or municipal data portals.
NHN data is separated into units that generally corresponds to sub-drainage areas, and is distributed in a variety of formats including GML (Geography Markup Language), KML (Keyhole Markup Language), SHAPE (ESRI) and GPKG (Geopackage). There are also maps of drainage areas that you download in PDF format
For more details on the data set refer to the Data Product Specifications documents that accompanies the NHN data sets
This data was originally distributed and housed within the GeoBase portal, but is under the responsibility of Natural Resources Canada and can now be found on the Federal Government's Open data portal => https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/a4b190fe-e090-4e6d-881e-b87956c07977
