Floodsheds Shapefile for 70 Latin America Cities

70 Latin American cities were selected for the index, including cities in Latin America with population greater than 750,000 according to the report conducted by the United Nations Population Division (UNPD 2011). Urban area definitions follow the United Nation’s Population Division (UNPD 2011). For urban extent, we used the Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project (GRUMP) urban extents based on nighttime light imagery and ancillary datasets (CIESIN et al. 2004, Balk 2009). Cities with connected GRUMP urban extents, such as Maracay, Caracas, and Valencia (Colombia), were divided based on the Global Administrative Database (GADM 2012) which defines municipal urban administrative areas. Havana was not included in the GRUMP dataset, and thus its urban extent was also defined with GADM (2012).

For riverine flooding, the unit of analysis was the city “floodshed”, comprised of all watersheds in the upstream contributing area to the urban extent of that city. Urban extents were defined by the GRUMP 2000 data set, and floodsheds delineated based on the HydroSHEDs digital elevation model. Additional watersheds were added to city floodsheds in special cases where a downstream river posed flooding threats to a city (e.g., Rio Jaqui for Porto Alegre, Brazil). A total of 780 watersheds were analyzed for 70 cities.