Barriers - Global Dam Watch
The current version of the GDW database (version 1.0) contains 41,145 barrier and dam locations and 35,295 associated reservoir polygons. The GDW database aims to include all types of anthropogenic instream barriers, though initial mapping efforts prioritize major dams that form reservoirs, as well as run-of-river barriers on larger rivers, for which more information is available. The present dataset represents barriers and dams geospatially referenced as point coordinates and co-registered to the global river network of HydroSHEDS (Lehner et al. 2008).
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The five foundational source datasets from which the first version of the GDW database was created are: 1) GOODD (Mulligan et al. 2020); 2) GRanD (version 1.4; Lehner et al. 2011); 3) FHReD (Zarfl et al. 2015); 4) JRC-GSW (Pekel et al. 2016); and 5) GROD (Yang et al. 2022).
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