Amazon River Basin Land and Stream Drainage Maps

High-resolution (~500 m) gridded land and stream drainage direction maps for the Amazon River basin, excluding the Rio Tocantins basin. The dataset includes 7 ESRI ArcGIS shapefiles and 4 GeoTiff images, created using a topography-independent analysis method from the Digital Chart of the World vector river network. It is provided by ORNL_CLOUD and was last updated in March 2026.

Use Cases

• Modeling surface water flow and drainage patterns across the Amazon basin using the gridded flow direction maps.
• Analyzing watershed characteristics and tributary basin boundaries for major Amazon River tributaries.
• Assigning stream order to river network reaches for hydrological network analysis.
• Integrating vector stream network coverage with raster land data for environmental impact studies.

Strengths

• Provides high-resolution spatial data at approximately 500-meter grid cells.
• Includes multiple data products: a stream network with assigned stream order, tributary basin boundaries, and source/mouth points.
• Created using a documented, topography-independent analysis method (Mayorga et al., 2005).

Limitations

• Excludes the Rio Tocantins basin from the Amazon River basin coverage.
• Conflicting last updated dates exist between sources (1960 vs. 2026), creating uncertainty about data currency.
• Specific row counts, column names, and dataset size are not provided.

Provenance

Source

ORNL_CLOUD, using the vector river network from the Digital Chart of the World (DCW, Danko, 1992).

Collection Method

Topography-independent analysis method (Mayorga et al., 2005) applied to DCW data to create flow direction maps.

Freshness

2026-03-13 01:18:00.432813

Geography

Amazon River basin, excluding the Rio Tocantins basin.