OS MasterMap Water Network Layer: Detailed Watercourses in Great Britain

OS MasterMap Water Network Layer offers a detailed, heighted water network for Great Britain, showing the flow and precise course of rivers, streams, lakes, and canals. The dataset is produced by the Government Digital Service and will become 'end of life' on 31 March 2026. It includes features such as aqueducts, tunnels, flow direction annotations, and inferred underground watercourses.

Use Cases

• Modeling flood risk and water-related hazards based on detailed watercourse flow and gradient data.
• Planning infrastructure projects based on the precise location of rivers, canals, and underground watercourses.
• Conducting environmental impact assessments based on the network's annotations of flow direction and proximity to other features.
• Creating combined 2D and 3D visualizations by integrating this layer with topography and property data.

Strengths

• Described as one of the world's most detailed, heighted water networks.
• Includes inferred features such as underground watercourses from entry and exit points.
• Designed for integration with other OS MasterMap layers like Topography for richer insights.

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count, file formats, and license are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

Government Digital Service

Collection Method

Official mapping by Ordnance Survey.

Time Range

Temporal coverage is not specified in the input.

Freshness

Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Geography

Great Britain