HydroSHEDS- Global River Dataset in Hi-Rez

by BRITTA RICKER PETERS on March 18, 2010 • cartography gis • 1 COMMENT

Data sets are often segmented by political boundaries. Typically, who cares? People who deal with environmental phenomenon that do not stop or change across political boundaries, they are the ones who care. Normally a cartographer or GIS analyst will stitch together datasets, fight with projections and plow through for a quick fix to their problem. My former professor at McGill University, Dr. Bernhard Lehner, decided to take a different route when he ran into this problem when working with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to characterize freshwater habitats within a remote region of the Amazon Basin.

First Dr. Lehner built a map with freshwater habitats of the entire Amazon Basin, then South America and now THE GLOBE! German cartographers do not cut corners!

The project is called “HydroSHEDS” (Hydrological data and maps based on Shuttle Elevation Derivatives at multiple Scales). Dr. Lehner used data gathered in 2000 by NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). He has produced the first high-resolution, seamless global river map in existence. You can read more about this project in the McGill Reporter, on Dr. Lehner’s website and on the WWF website where you can download the data set. This map in paper format will be featured in National Geographic on March 30!