TABLE 3.
Headwater Tributary Connections to Higher-Order Streams in River Networks.
| Headwater (First-Order) Streams |
|||
|---|---|---|---|
| Percentage of All Lower-Order Tributary Reaches Classified as First-Order Streams |
|||
| Strahler Stream-Order Class | Theoretical* | New England NHD | Number of NHD Stream Reaches |
| 2 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 11,775 |
| 3 | 66.7 | 46.5 | 5,019 |
| 4 | 57.1 | 54.3 | 2,527 |
| 5 | 53.3 | 57.7 | 1,181 |
| 6 | 51.6 | 53.5 | 497 |
| 7 | 50.8 | 51.1 | 45 |
*
The estimates are based on Tokunaga’s law for describing the average number of streams of a given order that are tributaries to higher-order streams (Dodds and Rothman, 2000). For common values of the network scaling parameters (Tokunaga, 2003), the average number of first-order tributaries to higher-order streams of order v is computed as 2v−1. In the table, the average number of first-order tributaries to a specified stream order is expressed as a percentage of the total number of all lower-order connecting tributaries for that stream order.