Abstract
Rivers are an important source of freshwater that support societal needs
and natural ecosystems, functioning as both collectors for watersheds
and distributors along river corridors. Human-made infrastructure (dams,
roads, canals) of various kinds have been built on and along rivers to
access drinking water, generate energy, mitigate floods, and support
industrial and agricultural production. However, due to the long and
inconsistent history of constructing and recording these structures, we
lack a globally consistent knowledge about where different types of
infrastructure are. Here, we used a simple yet consistent method to
visually locate and classify different infrastructures that could act as
obstructions on rivers that are wider than 30 meters (total length
~2.1 million km globally). Our approach is based on
Google Maps’ high resolution satellite images, which for many places
have meter-scale resolution. We recently completed global-scale mapping
and classifying different obstructions, and are conducting quality
checks. In total, we identified ≥ 40,000 unique obstructions, including
large dams and smaller weirs, control structures, partial barriers, as
well as low-head dams that are often not included in other databases.
This Global River Obstruction Dataset, or GROD, once fully validated,
will be freely available to the public. We anticipate that it will be of
wide interest to hydrological modeling, aquatic ecosystem,
geomorphology, and water resource management communities.