There are millions of river barriers worldwide, ranging from small locks to concrete dams, many of which form associated reservoirs to store water in small ponds or large reservoirs. Besides their intended benefits, there is growing recognition of critical environmental and social trade-offs related to these artificial structures. Knowing the precise location of dams or reservoirs within the global river network is of high importance to water managers, researchers, and policy makers, as it allows for allocating available water resources in space and time and evaluating potential scenarios of future changes in water demand and flow patterns. Despite this importance, global datasets describing the characteristics and geographical distribution of dams and reservoirs have been largely incomplete or are biased towards particular regions or specific applications, such as focusing on dams for hydropower production or irrigation reservoirs only.
Here, we present recent progress in developing and expanding a global dam and reservoir database developed under the guidance of the Global Dam Watch (GDW) consortium to support interdisciplinary, large-scale analyses at the Water-Energy-Food nexus. The GDW database contains more than 40,000 records of dams and reservoirs worldwide, compiled by harmonizing and curating existing data sources and performing extensive quality control processes to create a single, globally consistent data repository of dams and reservoirs that are co-registered to a digital river network. Recent additions focus particularly on the inclusion of dams and reservoirs detected through AI analyses of remote sensing imagery.
