Significant progress has been made in recent years in the creation of increasingly high-resolution and accurate hydrographic information that allows the delineation of watershed boundaries and river networks from global digital elevation models (DEMs) at up to ~90 m pixel resolution, with arguably the most prominent example being the HydroSHEDS database (Hydrological data and maps based on SHuttle Elevation Derivatives at multiple Scales) 9. Global data can also provide baseline information in remote areas where little monitoring is available yet stakeholders need to address urgent issues in a timely manner. In these cases, global data can provide consistent and homogeneous coverage required for seamless analyses. More than 260 large basins are considered transboundary at the global scale, representing 45% of the land surface and 40% of the world’s population 8. Furthermore, integrated freshwater resource assessments are often carried out at large scales, from regional to global, and thus suffer from incompatible or differing data conventions among the involved spatial units, such as multiple countries or river basins. Researchers, governments, water managers, policy makers, and conservation organizations around the world face the challenge of developing innovative strategies to alleviate the pressures on freshwater resources 6, and many applied approaches and solutions require large amounts of data 7. HydroATLAS is fully compatible with other products of the overarching HydroSHEDS project enabling versatile hydro-ecological assessments for a broad user community.įreshwater systems are under multiple threats 1 which can be detrimental to their biodiversity and the ecosystem services they provide 2, 3, 4, 5. The standardized format of HydroATLAS ensures easy applicability while the inherent topological information supports basic network functionality such as identifying up- and downstream connections. The sub-basin and river reach information is offered in two companion datasets: BasinATLAS and RiverATLAS. The attributes are linked to hierarchically nested sub-basins at multiple scales, as well as to individual river reaches, both extracted from the global HydroSHEDS database at 15 arc-second (~500 m) resolution. HydroATLAS derives the hydro-environmental characteristics by aggregating and reformatting original data from well-established global digital maps, and by accumulating them along the drainage network from headwaters to ocean outlets. Version 1.0 of HydroATLAS offers data for 56 variables, partitioned into 281 individual attributes and organized in six categories: hydrology physiography climate land cover & use soils & geology and anthropogenic influences. The HydroATLAS database provides a standardized compendium of descriptive hydro-environmental information for all watersheds and rivers of the world at high spatial resolution.
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