Geospatial European River Monitoring and Restoration Dataset (GERD)

Description

We utilised pan-European river network, land use, elevation, and soil datasets to create a novel Geospatial European River Monitoring and Restoration Dataset (GERD). This dataset provides geospatial information (dominant land use, land use areas, dominant soil type, average slope, Strahler order) for all European rivers and their catchments. The dataset was further integrated with i) all the Water Framework Directive Monitoring points, ii) Global Runoff Data Centre (GRDC) hydrological gauges, and iii) RESTORE river restoration points.

Steps to reproduce

A detailed description of the methodology can be found in the accompanied paper "Trends and Purposes of European River Monitoring and Restoration. " All processing of the geospatial data was done in ArcMap 10.8.1. Pan-European data on the river networks and their drainage basins was collected from the EU-Hydro River Network Database (https://land.copernicus.eu/en/products/eu-hydro). Lakes and reservoirs were omitted from the river and basin network.The 44 Corine land cover classes (https://land.copernicus.eu/en/products/corine-land-cover/clc2018) were reclassified to four main land use types: urban, agriculture, (semi-)natural, and water. For each catchment, the total area per land use type and the majority land use were calculated. The average slope per catchment was calculated from the EU-DEM (https://land.copernicus.eu/imagery-in-situ/eu-dem/eu-dem-v1.1). The catchments were dissolved with soil type (https://esdac.jrc.ec.europa.eu/content/european-soil-database-v20-vector-and-attribute-data#tabs-0-description=0) as a majority statistic, yielding the dominant soil type per catchment. Subsequently, the geospatial information was transferred to the river sections located within each catchment using intersect analysis. River sections with the same Strahler order within the same catchment were dissolved. The resulting river network dataset contains sectioned information on Strahler order, dominant land use, average slope, dominant soil type, and river length. Monitoring points reported to the WFD in 2010, 2016, and 2022 by the EU member and partner countries were gathered from the European Environment Agency geospatial data catalogue (https://sdi.eea.europa.eu/catalogue/srv/api/records/eb812f32-c4ae-4101-a2af-350d0df76bab; https://sdi.eea.europa.eu/catalogue/srv/api/records/eb812f32-c4ae-4101-a2af-350d0df76bab; https://sdi.eea.europa.eu/catalogue/srv/api/records/fe9a31a0-9595-41b1-9f33-9dcda219acf3). All WFD monitoring points for groundwater, and all WFD points that were located within 100 m of waterbodies were removed so that only river monitoring points were retained. European hydrological river gauging station information was obtained from the GRDC, containing river discharge measurements over the entire world (https://portal.grdc.bafg.de/applications/public.html?publicuser=PublicUser#dataDownload/Home). A pan-European dataset on river restoration was obtained from the RESTORE Project (https://restorerivers.eu/wiki/index.php?title=Special%3ARunQuery/Case_study_query_comprehensive). The WFD monitoring points, RESTORE points, GRDC points were linked with the geospatial data from the nearest river section using 'Spatial Join’ tool. Duplicate points on the same river were identified and omitted from further analysis. The shared geospatial data is in shapefile format. For data analysis outside GIS software, the geospatial information can be extracted as tables.

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