Digital Basemap for the Lower Meuse Valley Palaeogeography

This dataset "Digital Basemap for the Lower Meuse Valley Palaeogeography” provides a detailed reconstruction of the Lower Meuse Valley since the Weichselian Late Pleniglacial. It covers the Meuse reach between Maastricht and Nijmegen (The Netherlands).

The Meuse valley provides an outstanding example of geomorphological preservation of terrace elements of different fluvial styles, produced during the Weichselian Lateglacial and Holocene. By means of compiling an Age Determination Database (Access tables) and a vector polygon geological map (ArcGIS), shapefiles were produced that give overview of the age of series of terraces and of the paleogeography of the active river bed. The setup of database and GIS is such that it unlocks the information hidden in older published sources and institutional databases (i.e. from journal papers, archaeological reports, geological survey mapping activities, university fieldworks, etc.) in a modern, quick to use but still to trace form. The digital basemap and underpinning ID database were created using the same software setup and database structure as the 2012 Rhine-Meuse Delta Digital Base Map elsewhere on this depository website [ https://doi.org/10.17026/dans-x7g-sjtw ]. In the north of the study area, where coverage overlaps, the new maps here updates the 2012 version.

Production of this dataset is part of the project: “Reconstruction and Modelling of the Meuse- and Rhine River. Sinuosity Response to Faulting in the Roer Valley Rift System” funded by The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO; project nr. 821.01.011).

The first peer-reviewed publication using the dataset is: “Spatial and temporal variations in river terrace formation, preservation and morphology. Lower Meuse Valley, the Netherlands” (Woolderink et al., exp. 2018).