CRD v1.1: Nearly 100,000 Reservoirs in China with Location and Capacity

97,435 reservoirs across China are cataloged in this geospatial database, with an aggregated inundation area of 50,085.21 km² and an estimated total storage capacity of 979.62 Gt. The dataset, created by Chunqiao Song of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, includes two subsets: a comprehensive database derived from remote sensing and a smaller, manually compiled set of 5,143 recorded reservoirs from yearbooks. Attributes likely include location, area, capacity, and hydrological characteristics.

Use Cases

• Modeling regional water storage and availability based on reservoir capacity and area data.
• Analyzing the spatial distribution of water infrastructure based on province, prefecture, and county location attributes.
• Estimating hydrological impacts such as river discharge and residence time based on the described attributes.
• Comparing reservoir characteristics between the larger remotely-sensed dataset and the smaller, documented subset.

Strengths

• Large scale with 97,435 georeferenced reservoirs.
• Provides specific aggregate metrics: 50,085.21 km² total area and 979.62 Gt total storage capacity.
• Includes a validated subset of 5,143 reservoirs manually compiled from yearbooks, accounting for a majority of the total area and capacity.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.
• The description does not specify the time period the reservoir data represents.

Provenance

Source

Chinese Academy of Sciences

Collection Method

Combines reservoirs identified via remote sensing with a subset manually compiled from yearbooks and documents.

Geography

China