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Free vector and raster map data at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110m scales
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## Rivers, Lake Centerlines

Single-line drainages including optional lake centerlines.
Download rivers and lake centerlines (447.22 KB) version 5.0.0
Download with scale ranks + tapering (527.28 KB) version 5.0.0

About

Generalized from the 10 million rivers. The 50 million rivers primarily derive from World Data Bank 2. Double line rivers in WDB2 were digitized to created single line drainages. All rivers received manual smoothing and position adjustments to fit shaded relief generated from SRTM Plus elevation data, which is more recent and (presumably) more accurate.

Lake centerlines obtained by manually drawing connecting segments in reservoirs. When available, Admin 0 and 1 political boundaries in reservoirs serve as the lake centerlines.

Ranked by relative importance. Includes name and line width attributes for creating tapered drainages.

(below) Congo River basin, Africa.

Includes scale ranks (large rivers, small rivers):

(below) Southern United States.

Avoid data dump overload:

(below) Quebec, Canada in Natural Earth compared to Digital Chart of the World.

Issues

Does not include intermittent rivers (eg: large seasonal rivers in Australia draining to Lake Eyre playas). Rivers in northeastern Russia and parts of the Amazon basin have suspect alignments.

Version History

- 5.0.0
- 4.1.0
- 4.0.0
- 3.0.0
- 2.0.0
- 1.0.0

The master changelog is available on Github »

This entry was posted on Monday, September 21st, 2009 at 10:10 am and is filed under 50m-physical-vectors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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