Dataset of Georeferenced Dams in South America (DDSA)

Abstract

Abstract. Dams and their reservoirs generate major impacts on society and the environment. In general, its relevance relies on facilitating the management of water resources for anthropogenic purposes, however, dams could also generate many potential adverse impacts related to safety, ecology or biodiversity. These factors, and the additional effects that climate change could cause in these infrastructures and their surrounding environment, highlight the importance of dams and the necessity for their continuous monitoring and study. There are several studies examining dams both at regional and global scale, however, those that include the South America region focus mainly on the most renowned basins (primarily the Amazon basin), most likely due to the lack of records on the rest of the basins of the region. For this reason, a consistent database of georeferenced dams located in South America is presented: Dataset of georeferenced dams in South America DDSA. It contains 1,010 entries of dams with a combined reservoir volume of 1,017 cubic kilometres and it is presented in form of a list describing a total of 24 attributes that include the dams name, characteristics, purposes and georeferenced location. Also, hydrological and additional information on the dam’s catchments is also included: catchment area, mean precipitation, mean near-surface temperature, mean potential evapotranspiration, mean runoff, population and equipped area for irrigation. Information was obtained from public records, governments records, existing international databases and from extensive internet research. Each register was validated individually and geolocated using public access online map browsers and then, hydrological and additional information was derived from a hydrological model computed using the Hydrosheds dataset. With this database, we expect to contribute the development of new research in this region. The database is publicly available in https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3885280.

Alteration of River Flow and Flood Dynamics by Existing and Planned Hydropower Dams in the Amazon River Basin

“…Furthermore, the hydrological impacts of dams presented in this study could represent a rather conservative estimate because many of the small dams, which may offset the impact estimate significantly, were not considered in the analysis due to data limitations. With the gradual increase in availability of data such as the Dataset of Georeferenced Dams in South America (DDSA; Paredes‐Beltran et al., 2021) and Georeferenced Global Dam and Reservoir (GeoDAR) data set (Wang et al., 2021), along with near real‐time reservoir operation monitoring tools such as the Reservoir Assessment Tool (RAT; Biswas et al., 2021), future studies could provide improved estimates on the growing influence of dams on Amazonian hydrology and hydrodynamics.…”

Improved maps of surface water bodies, large dams, reservoirs, and lakes in China

“…2a). However, it includes both large, moderate, and small dams, and does not report the corresponding reservoir attributes (e.g., reservoir area), which limits its applications to water-related research (Paredes-Beltran et al, 2021). The GRanD dataset has the smallest number (814) of large dams with reservoir area > 1 km 2 in China (Fig.…”

“…Several published global dam and reservoir datasets include information from China (Table 1). The World Register of Dams (WRD), which was organized and released by the International Commission on Large Dams (ICOLD, 2011), is the largest and widely-used dataset (Mulligan et al, 2020;Paredes-Beltran et al, 2021;Wang et al, 2022a). It reports 23 841 dam entries for China; however, a large proportion of those entries are not georeferenced with latitude and longitude information, which limits its wide applications (Wang et al, 2022a).…”

Dataset of Georeferenced Dams in South America (DDSA)

“…The Database of Georeferenced Dams in South America (DDSA) is a joint effort of researchers from the Department of Civil Engineering: Hydraulics, Energy and Environment of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and the Carrera de Ingeniería Civil of the Universidad Técnica de Ambato. The DDSA database is available for both researchers and the general public through its ZENODO openaccess repository at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4315647 (Paredes-Beltran et al, 2020), where we have detailed the contact information of the authors, in order to receive any valuable contribution which could allow us to improve our database. The files provided through the ZENODO repository include (i) 13 files that describe all the attributes of the database in CSV (comma-separated values) format, (ii) 1 file of the database in KML (Keyhole Markup Language) format to be used with online map browsers, (iii) 2 files in SHP (shapefile) format with information on the dams and watersheds of the database to be used with GIS (geographic information system) software, and (iv) 1 file in CSV format with information on future dams in South America.…”