GLADD-R: A new Global Lake Dynamics Database for Reservoirs created using machine learning and satellite data

Abstract

Reservoirs play a crucial role for human sustenance as they provide freshwater for agriculture, power generation, human consumption, and recreation. A global database of reservoirs that provides their location and dynamics can be of great importance to the ecological community as it enables the study of the impact of human actions and climate change on fresh water availability. Here we present a new database, GLADD-R (Global Lake Dynamics Database-Reservoirs) that provides such information for 1882 reservoirs between 1 and 100 square kilometers in size that were created after 1985. The visualization of these reservoirs and their surface area time series is available at http://umnlcc.cs.umn.edu/GlobalReservoirDatabase/.