Longitudinal and Lateral confinements in the Pearl River Basin

This dataset provides spatially explicit estimates of river confinement in the Pearl River Basin from 1985 to 2019, derived based on the MERIT-Basins river network. It consists of two CSV files: DOR.csv: Contains the longitudinal confinement metric, represented by the Degree Of Regulation (DOR), indicating the extent of flow regulation (% ranging from 0 to 100). Data are provided at annual resolution from 1985 to 2019. URB.csv: Represents lateral confinement, quantified by the URBanized floodplain percentage (URB) of each river reach’s subcatchment. Values range from 0 to 100 (%), recorded at 5-year intervals before 2000 and annually from 2000 to 2019. A value of -1 indicates that the corresponding river reach has no floodplain. Both datasets are aligned with the MERIT-Basins river network and are designed to support analyses of human-induced constraints on river dynamics at the reach scale. For more details, please refer to: Lin H, Lin P, Zheng K. Human perturbations reshape hydrological responses in riverine systems: Insights from a reach-level quantification framework to the Pearl River Basin[J]. Sustainable Horizons, 2026, 17: 100174.