QSWAT+ / TauDEM ERROR 4: Unable to open .shx and failed to create stream shapefile

[北科大-吳邦源]

I am a graduate student at National Taipei University of Technology, and I am using QSWAT+ for my thesis research on watershed delineation. 

 I am using QSWAT+ for watershed delineation, and I encountered the following error when running TauDEM StreamNet:

ERROR 4: Unable to open D:/SWAT/TEST2/TWO\Watershed\Shapes\usethischannel\usethischannel.shx or .SHX
ERROR 4: Failed to open file ... usethischannel.shp. It may be corrupt or read-only file accessed in update mode.

The issue occurs after I added an outlet and a reservoir, which triggered a re-delineation. The initial delineation works fine, but the error appears during the StreamNet step when the model tries to recreate the stream shapefile.

Software versions:
QGIS: 3.34.x
QSWAT+: 3.1.x
TauDEM: 5.3.9
OS: Windows 11

It seems that TauDEM cannot overwrite or recreate the shapefile during re-delineation.

Landscape delineation failed for identifying upslope and floodplain 

Are there recommended workflows to avoid this failure when modifying outlet/reservoir?

[Chris George]

QGIS can sometimes hang on to part of a shapefile, e.g. the .shp and
.dbf files while deleting others, like the .shx. Check the
Watershed/Shapes folder of your project and delete all the
usethischannel files and then restart the project.

Chris

On 3/24/2026 10:41 AM, 北科大-吳邦源 wrote:
> I am a graduate student at National Taipei University of Technology, and
> I am using QSWAT+ for my thesis research on watershed delineation.    I
> am using QSWAT+ for watershed delineation, and I encountered the
> following error when running TauDEM

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