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Lake-TopoCat: Global lake drainage topology and catchment database...
Lake-TopoCat provides a global-scale dataset that links lakes with their drainage topology, delineates catchments, defines inter-lake pathways, and quantifies topological...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.
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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...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.
