Communications of the ACM
Building a Better Dam Map
McGill University's Bernhard Lehner, who led the four-year project that developed the Global Reservoir and Dam database.
Photo courtesy of McGill University
A geographically explicit, high-resolution global database of large dams and reservoirs has been developed by a team of scientists at McGill University.
Until now, the key environmental and social tradeoffs of dams and reservoirs within the global river network could not be closely examined because the data describing their location, size, and purpose has been incomplete and inadequate. "Now we can look at all of them at the same time to figure out what the combined effect is," says McGill University's Bernhard Lehner, who led the four-year project that developed the Global Reservoir and Dam database (GRanD). "This gives us a holistic view of a whole river basin."
Currently, GRanD has information on 6,862 dams and their associated reservoirs with a total storage capacity of 6,197 cubic kilometers. The scientists estimate that about 16.7 million reservoirs larger than 0.01ha may exist worldwide, and nearly half of large rivers are affected by large dams and reservoirs worldwide. In most cases, GRanD includes the name of the dam and reservoir, spatial coordinates, construction year, surface area, storage capacity, dam height, main purpose, and elevation.
From McGill University
View Full Article
Abstracts Copyright © 2011 Information Inc. 
, Bethesda, Maryland, USA
No entries found