Lake-TopoCat: Global lake drainage topology and catchment database (HydroLAKES-TopoCat v1.1)
Lake-TopoCat provides a global-scale dataset that links lakes with their drainage topology, delineates catchments, defines inter-lake pathways, and quantifies topological attributes (upstream/downstream relationships, drainage distances, outlet multiplicity, etc.). The input is based on HydroLAKES v1.0 and MERIT Hydro (3 arcsec), with algorithms to detect possible lake bifurcation, unit catchment delineation, reach segmentation, and network attribution. The database includes: * Lake boundary polygons (same as HydroLAKES) enriched with drainage attributes * Lake outlet points * Unit catchment polygons corresponding to each lake outlet * Inter-lake reach lines connecting outlets * Lake-network basins (basin polygons delineating the full drainage domain of each lake network) It covers ~1.43 million lakes (≥10 ha) and ~1.46 million outlets globally, and ~3 million inter-lake reaches, spanning ~77.5 × 10⁶ km² of catchment coverage (≈ 57 % of global landmass, excluding Antarctica). The dataset is freely available via Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7916729) and is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Regional Partitions: Lake-TopoCat Global Pfafstetter Level-2
This dataset provides the Pfafstetter Level-2 regional divisions used for the Lake-TopoCat: Global Lake Drainage Topology and Catchment Database (Sikder et al., 2023). It divides the global landmass (excluding Antarctica) into 68 major hydrological regions, following the Pfafstetter hierarchical basin coding scheme. Each polygon represents a large river basin or regional hydrological domain, enabling distributed processing and subsetting of the global Lake-TopoCat database. The shapefile is designed to support regional analyses and efficient data handling for users who wish to work with subsets of the Lake-TopoCat data. Each feature includes a unique Pfafstetter Level-2 ID, region name (where applicable), and attributes referencing upstream/downstream hierarchies.
This is the SLD Style File to use on the Regional Partitions in the Geospatial Viewer.
File uploaded: Catchments_pfaf_76.zip Auto-generated description
File uploaded: Basins_pfaf_76.zip Auto-generated description
File uploaded: Lakes_pfaf_76.zip Auto-generated description