This polygon shapefile depicts watershed drainage basins in the County of Santa Cruz, California, including number codes to identify individual watersheds. This coverage includes these major watersheds: 1) North Coast, 2) San Lorenzo, 3) Soquel/Aptos, and 4) Pajaro. These drainage basins function as watershed drainage or catchment areas. The county watershed coding system is designed with two purposes: 1) to be able to aggregate watersheds and associated geographic information by code number ranges, and 2) to allow flexibility for future designation of additional sub-watersheds. Monitoring stations on streams can also be designated using the same coding system. Attributes are coded to represent the major drainage basin a watershed is located within, as well as its location within that Basin. Attributes include a number (1 through 4) representing the major drainage basin, followed by another number indicating its postion relative to other Watersheds in that Basin. The higher the second number, the farther up the drainage basin. This layer is part of a collection of GIS data created for Santa Cruz County, California. The Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Unit falls under the purview of the County of Santa Cruz Information Services Department. The GIS Unit serves all County departments and external customers and provides data on land, features and people of Santa Cruz County. Santa Cruz County encompasses 4 cities and approximately 265,000 people. This coverage can be used for basic applications such as viewing, querying and map output production, or to provide a basemap to support graphical overlays and analyses of geospatial data. County of Santa Cruz Information Services Department. (2015). Watershed Drainage Basins: Santa Cruz County, California, 2015. Santa Cruz County, California. Available at http://purl.stanford.edu/cp847hc0870. GIS Layer Number = 67/ Watershed boundaries were drawn onto USGS 7.5 minute quadrangle sheets using existing topographic lines. These lines were then digitized using at least two known control points per quad sheet. The digital lines were plotted and reviewed by the Water Quality Program Manager of the County's Environmental Health staff. These were then revised to be consistent with Least Disturbed Watershed boundaries (layer 40) and Water-Supply Watersheds (layer 42) which were deemed to be more accurate. These data were compiled from many different sources; therefore, the accuracy of the individual layers varies significantly, and some layers do not align exactly with others. In the urban areas, data are generally accurate within five to ten feet of their true geographic coordinates, but in the rural areas, data may be accurate to only within three hundred feet. With these limitations, the County of Santa Cruz disclaims any responsibility for the accuracy or correctness of this data. This disclaimer is exclusive and in lieu of any warranties, fitness for particular purpose, and/or any other type of warranty, whether expressed or implied. This layer is presented in the WGS84 coordinate system for web display purposes. Downloadable data are provided in native coordinate system or projection.