Pan-Amazon Basins: A spatial Framework for the Conservation of Aquatic Ecosystems in the Amazon-Orinoco-Guianas Region

This database is composed of a hierarchical system of watersheds organized in twelve levels, with spatial coverage for the so-called Pan-Amazon region that contains the Amazon, Tocantins, Guianas, Orinoco, Paranaíba, Paraná headwaters, and coastal basins north and south of the mouth of the Amazon River. The system has 142,572 basins at the most detailed level (BL 12), with an average size of 6541 ha. The base follows the logic of SNAPP (Venticinque et al 2016) that considers the delineation of the main stem for the main rivers of each basin at levels 1 and 2. For making this base we used the elevation, flow direction, and flow accumulation files from MERIT Hydro (Yamashida et al 2019). The analyses were performed in ArcHydro 2.0 within ArcGis 10.1. After deriving the basins and defining the mainstem areas, the integrated tool was applied to simplify the geometry of the basin boundaries jointly between the 12 levels. Finally, a geodatabase was generated containing the 12 basin levels provided here.