Abstract
There are millions of river barriers worldwide, ranging from wooden locks to concrete dams, many of which form associated impoundments to store water in small ponds or large reservoirs. Besides their benefits, there is growing recognition of important environmental and social trade-offs related to these artificial structures. However, global datasets describing their characteristics and geographical distribution are often biased towards particular regions or specific applications, such as hydropower dams affecting fish migration, and are thus not globally consistent. Here, we present a new river barrier and reservoir database developed by the Global Dam Watch (GDW) consortium that integrates, harmonizes, and augments existing global datasets to support large-scale analyses. Data curation involved extensive quality control processes to create a single, globally consistent data repository of instream barriers and reservoirs that are co-registered to a digital river network. Version 1.0 of the GDW database contains 41,145 barrier locations and 35,295 associated reservoir polygons representing a cumulative storage capacity of 7,420 km3 and an artificial terrestrial surface water area of 304,600 km2.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 1069 |
| Journal | Scientific Data |
| Volume | 11 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 8 Oct 2024 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© The Author(s) 2024.
Funding
We dedicate this manuscript to the memory of Jonathan Higgins, who provided support, passion, expertise, critique (never shy), common sense, humor, and inspiration to the GDW project, in line with his visionary approach to applying data and science for the betterment of the world. The authors would like to thank the Global Dam Watch consortium and their partners for coordinating the development of the GDW database. Several international meetings and workshops were facilitated and sponsored by Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) Netherlands, WWF-US, and the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) under funding received from the National Science Foundation DBI-1639145. Additional funding for the database development was provided by the World Bank, and by McGill University, Montreal, Canada. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The World Bank, its Board of Executive Directors, or the governments they represent. M.M. and A.vS. were supported by the European Union\u2019s Horizon 2020 FET Proactive Programme under grant agreement No. 10101785. S.R.J. was supported by the Welsh European Funding Office and European Regional Development Fund under Project 80761-SU-140 (West); B.B. was supported by the \u00C9cole Universitaire de Recherche H2O\u2019Lyon (ANR-17-EURE-0018) and by the GloUrb project (ANR-22-CE03-0005). The authors would like to thank Sean Turner (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) and one anonymous reviewer for their constructive critique which helped to improve the manuscript. Finally, we would like to thank and acknowledge all original data providers for their invaluable contributions to this project.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Oak Ridge National Laboratory | |
| World Bank Group | |
| World Wildlife Fund | |
| McGill University | |
| Welsh European Funding Office | |
| National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center | |
| European Union’s Horizon 2020 FET | 10101785 |
| National Science Foundation | DBI-1639145 |
| École Universitaire de Recherche H2O | ANR-22-CE03-0005, ANR-17-EURE-0018 |
| European Regional Development Fund | 80761-SU-140 |
Keywords
- Reservoirs
- Dam sediments
- River
- GIS
- Mapping
- Global
- Environmental
- Hydropo
- Data
