Global Extent of Human-Regulated Water Bodies (GHW)

This dataset provides a global inventory of human-regulated water bodies (HWs), identified using remote sensing and deep learning. The dataset includes 0.96 million HWs, ranging in size from 0.001 km², with a complete record for HWs larger than 0.1 km². The dataset consists of the following attributes:

area_km2: This attribute represents the area of each water body in square kilometers. It was calculated from the GSW maximum extent layer and other data sources.

source: In cases where the developed product overlapped with datasets from CRD, GOODD, or GeoDAR, we prioritized the sources in the following order: CRD, followed by GeoDAR, and finally GOODD. Specifically, if an overlap occurred between the developed product and any of these datasets, we retained the source data from CRD as the highest priority. If CRD data was not available, we used data from GeoDAR, with GOODD being used as the last option.

'Hao et al. 2025': Data directly derived and classified using the methodologies described in Hao et al.

'GeoDAR v1.1': HWs identified from the GeoDAR v1.1 dataset.

'GOODD': HWs identified from the GOODD dataset.

'CRD': HWs identified from the CRD dataset.

lon: Longitude coordinate of the centroid of the water body.

lat: Latitude coordinate of the centroid of the water body.

Interactive map is available: https://haozhen.projects.earthengine.app/view/global-extent-of-human-regulated-water-bodies