Global hydro-environmental sub-basin and river reach characteristics at high spatial resolution

Abstract

The HydroATLAS database provides a standardized compendium of descriptive hydro-environmental information for all watersheds and rivers of the world at high spatial resolution. 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. 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. 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. The sub-basin and river reach information is offered in two companion datasets: BasinATLAS and RiverATLAS. The standardized format of HydroATLAS ensures easy applicability while the inherent topological information supports basic network functionality such as identifying up- and downstream connections. HydroATLAS is fully compatible with other products of the overarching HydroSHEDS project enabling versatile hydro-ecological assessments for a broad user community.

Threshold responses of riverine fish communities to land use conversion across regions of the world

“…between percent urban and percent agricultural land was generally low across all sites for each region (Pearson correlation coefficients: Australia [SEQ] r = −.23, Belgium [Flanders] r = −.74, France r = −.37, New Zealand r = .07, South Korea r = −.01, Sweden r = .31, United Kingdom [England] r = −.10, United States r = −.09).Using HydroBASINS, we also calculated the following environmental variables for each site: long-term average annual air temperature (°C) according to WorldClim(Hijmans, Cameron, Parra, Jones, & Jarvis, 2005), average elevation within subwatershed (m), modeled long-term average annual 'naturalized' discharge (m 3 /s) according to the global integrated water model WaterGap v2.2(Döll, Kaspar, & Lehner, 2003), and degree of flow regulation (%) calculated as the percent of the total annual discharge volume of the reach that can be withheld by all upstream reservoirs according to HydroSHEDS and Global Reservoir and Dam Database (https://www.hydro sheds.org/page/hydro atlas;Linke et al, 2019). The sites varied in long-term average annual air temperature (9.6 ± 4.0°C), average elevation within subwatershed (453.0 ± 491.0 m), modeled long-term average annual "naturalized" discharge (38.0 ± 54.4 m 3 /s), and degree of flow regulation at the subwatershed scale (15.4 ± 162.5%); thus representing a broad range of riverine types and sizes in temperate, subtropical, and boreal climate zones(Figure 1;…”

Dams and protected areas: Quantifying the spatial and temporal extent of global dam construction within protected areas

“…Finally, we constrained the current PA estate to only those PAs that have rivers running through them. We achieved this by overlaying PA polygons with the global River ATLAS database (Linke et al., 2019), which maps river lines starting at all locations where the catchment area exceeds 10 km 2 or the average river flow exceeds 0.1 cubic meters per second (or both of these criteria are fulfilled). We also identified the primary uses of the dams within PAs as identified in the GRanD database (Lehner et al., 2011).…”

Evaluating a landscape-scale daily water balance model to support spatially continuous representation of flow intermittency throughout stream networks

“…For example, similar to the Geofabric data (Stein et al, 2014) used here, the National Hydrography Dataset Plus (NHDPlus) and HydroATLAS (Linke et al, 2019) provide hydrographic datasets and hydro-environmental attributes for national (USA) and global scales, respectively. In addition, similar to the daily flow model AWRA-L used in this study, other global-and national-scale hydrologic models are also available, such as the global WaterGAP model (Döll et al, 2003), the community Noah land surface model (Noah-MP) (Niu et al, 2011) in the USA, and the HYPE model (Lindström et al, 2010) in Sweden.…”