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The Global Lakes and Wetlands Database (GLWD)

The Global Lakes and Wetlands Database (GLWD) version 2 provides a comprehensive and seamless global map of inland surface waters distinguished into 33 waterbody and wetland types. GLWD v2 was developed by harmonizing the best available ground- and satellite-based data sources and has been designed to represent the maximum non-overlapping extents of aquatic ecosystems over the broad contemporary period of 1990-2020.

GLWD v2 represents a total of 18.2 million km2 of wetlands at a grid cell resolution of 15 arc-seconds (approximately 500 m at the equator). The data consist of a map of the dominant waterbody or wetland type in each grid cell, as well as 33 individual class layers which represent the sub-cell fraction of each specific class within each grid cell.

Version 2 of GLWD (Lehner et al., 2025) is the successor of the widely-used GLWD version 1 (Lehner & Döll, 2004). The quality, resolution, and format of GLWD v2 significantly improves upon GLWD v1 and supersedes the older version.

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Cite this as

DOI:
10.5194/essd-17-2277-2025
Lehner, B., Anand, M., Fluet-Chouinard, E., Tan, F., Aires, F., Allen, G.H., Bousquet, P., Canadell, J.G., Davidson, N., Ding, M., Finlayson, C.M., Gumbricht, T., Hilarides, L., Hugelius, G., Jackson, R.B., Korver, M.C., Liu, L., McIntyre, P.B., Matthews, E., Nagy, S., Olefeldt, D., Pavelsky, T.M., Pekel, J.-F., Poulter, B., Prigent, C., Wang, J., Worthington, T.A., Yamazaki, D., Zhang, X., Thieme, M. (2025). Mapping the world’s inland surface waters: an upgrade to the Global Lakes and Wetlands Database (GLWD v2). Earth System Science Data 17, 2277–2329. https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-2277-2025
Published: 2025-07-28 | Publisher: UNESCO

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Basic information
DOI https://doi.org/10.63253/cutgyky5 Private DOI
Resource type Spatial data set
Date of creation 2025-07-28
Date of last revision 2025-07-28
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Metadata identifier The-Global-Lakes-and-Wetlands-Database-(GLWD)
Metadata language English
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Name of the dataset creator (Legacy) IHP-WINS
Name of the dataset maintainer IHP-WINS
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Email of the dataset creator (Legacy) ihp-wins@unesco.org
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