Abstract. Geography and associated hydrological, hydroclimate and land-use
conditions and their changes determine the states and dynamics of wetlands
and their ecosystem services. The influences of these controls are not
limited to just the local scale of each individual wetland but extend over
larger landscape areas that integrate multiple wetlands and their total
hydrological catchment – the wetlandscape. However, the data and knowledge
of conditions and changes over entire wetlandscapes are still scarce,
limiting the capacity to accurately understand and manage critical wetland
ecosystems and their services under global change. We present a new
Wetlandscape Change Information Database (WetCID), consisting of geographic,
hydrological, hydroclimate and land-use information and data for 27
wetlandscapes around the world. This combines survey-based local information
with geographic shapefiles and gridded datasets of large-scale hydroclimate
and land-use conditions and their changes over whole wetlandscapes.
Temporally, WetCID contains 30-year time series of data for mean monthly
precipitation and temperature and annual land-use conditions. The
survey-based site information includes local knowledge on the wetlands,
hydrology, hydroclimate and land uses within each wetlandscape and on the
availability and accessibility of associated local data. This novel database
(available through PANGAEA https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.907398; Ghajarnia
et al., 2019) can support site assessments; cross-regional comparisons; and
scenario analyses of the roles and impacts of land use, hydroclimatic and
wetland conditions, and changes in whole-wetlandscape functions and ecosystem
services.
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