Hydro Stack: Automated geospatial processing workflow for Water Security Planning

Shubham Kumar , Aaditeshwar Seth

Watershed and micro-watershed delineation underlies a wide range of water security and land management decisions; yet existing global hydrographic products such as HydroSHEDS are static, coarser, and not readily reproducible or adaptable to new regions or scales. We present Hydro Stack, an open-source, end-to-end workflow that automates micro-watershed delineation and hydrological characterization for any user-supplied area of interest. Given only a boundary vector, the pipeline resolves the appropriate projection, acquires and conditions elevation data, delineates micro-watersheds via a hydrologically consistent basin-merging procedure, and derives a unified set of layers, such as natural depressions, drainage networks with stream ordering, pour points, specific catchment area, catchment-level stream order, and inter-basin drainage connectivity. Built mostly on GRASS GIS and released as a containerized, script based pipeline, Hydro Stack makes every step of the analysis transparent, reconfigurable, and reproducible, providing a generalized foundation for local-level hydrological planning.