The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) first created BASINS (Better Assessment Science Integrating Point and Nonpoint Sources) in 1996 as an aid to water resource planners concerned with water quality and watershed analyses. The strength of BASINS is its integration of "a geographic information system (GIS), national watershed data, and state-of-the-art environmental assessment and modeling...

The Software and Predictive Models Web site is maintained by the US Geological Survey Fort Collins Science Center. The unique research tools offered free for download are products developed by scientists working at the center and are therefore only available from this site. An example is the Instream Flow Incremental Methodology for "approaching various issues related to developing an instream...

The USGS offers fifty software programs that are freely available. The programs can be browsed alphabetically or in five subject categories. Each program is accompanied by computer platform requirements, a summary of the program, readme files, pointers to decompression utilities, and documentation information (including selected downloadable user's manuals). Summaries contain pointers to other...