Built for courses in surface water hydrology, watershed management, nonpoint source pollution, and agricultural water quality. SwaNET's one-click watershed generation turns semester-long setup into a 5-minute in-class demonstration — leaving the real learning time for hydrology itself.
Active Learning with SwaNET
Four ways in: watch it, investigate it, design with it, and solve with it. The Design rung is live today; the rest arrive in upcoming releases.
Short, narrated simulations — the foundation rung.
Guided SwaNET runs of runoff, the Sankey water balance, and sediment & nutrient transport — on real basins.
Open-ended cases where students investigate the way professionals do.
Diagnose an impaired stream, attribute a nutrient load, or test a TMDL — question-driven cases on real watersheds. Each case is open-ended: students form a hypothesis, interrogate a real site with the model, and defend a conclusion from evidence — the way professionals actually work.
Game-based design competitions — already developed. Students compete inside SwaNET, defending plans with simulated outcomes, not opinions.
Give students a watershed and a development pressure. One team maximizes economic value. Another team protects water quality. A third optimizes flood resilience. They defend their plans with simulated outcomes, not opinions. The watershed refuses to reward narrative alone.
The canonical teaching problem. A severely degraded watershed must be restored to meet water quality standards. Students design a restoration portfolio — combining land-use modifications, agricultural management changes, structural BMPs, and riparian restoration — to produce dramatic, measurable watershed health improvement. The competition rewards students who learn the single most important lesson in watershed engineering: where and how land is managed matters more than what devices are installed.
A graded problem library that turns every concept into assessable practice.
Database-driven watershed problems on real sites, browsable by topic and difficulty, ready to assign.
Watershed teaching has always been bottlenecked by data. A single analysis used to require weeks of GIS work — downloading DEMs, digitizing soils, delineating subbasins, acquiring land cover, configuring hydrologic response units, running calibration, verifying against gauge data. A semester-long class might build one model. Students saw one watershed, one set of conditions, one analysis — usually at the end of the semester, when there was no time to do anything meaningful with it.
Draw a box on the global map. Pick an outflow point. Watch a complete watershed model build itself in under ten minutes — DEM, soils, land use, climate, delineation, full simulation, USGS comparison. Students stop watching videos of watersheds and start investigating them. The first class session is no longer a slideshow; it's a live demonstration where the instructor loads, runs, and explains any watershed a student asks for.
Run the same watershed under 1990 precipitation, 2020 precipitation, and projected 2050 conditions. Students see their watershed's climate vulnerability with their own eyes — peak flows, baseflow, snowmelt timing, water quality — which is very different from reading about it. Then ask: what design choices would be robust across all three futures?.