Mapping the world’s free-flowing rivers

By G. Grill, B. Lehner, M. Thieme, B. Geenen, D. Tickner, F. Antonelli, S. Babu, P. Borrelli, L. Cheng, H. Crochetiere and 24 more. Nature, 2019

2,010 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Free-flowing rivers (FFRs) support diverse, complex and dynamic ecosystems globally, providing important societal and economic services. Infrastructure development threatens the ecosystem processes, biodiversity and services that these rivers support. Here we assess the connectivity status of 12 million kilometres of rivers globally and identify those that remain free-flowing in their entire length. Only 37 per cent of rivers longer than 1,000 kilometres remain free-flowing over their entire length and 23 per cent flow uninterrupted to the ocean. Very long FFRs are largely restricted to remote regions of the Arctic and of the Amazon and Congo basins. In densely populated areas only few very long rivers remain free-flowing, such as the Irrawaddy and Salween. Dams and reservoirs and their up- and downstream propagation of fragmentation and flow regulation are the leading contributors to the loss of river connectivity. By applying a new method to quantify riverine connectivity and map FFRs, we provide a foundation for concerted global and national strategies to maintain or restore them. A comprehensive assessment of the world’s rivers and their connectivity shows that only 37 per cent of rivers longer than 1,000 kilometres remain free-flowing over their entire length.

Subfields: Nature and Landscape Conservation, Sociology and Political Science, Water Science and Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/911c7e21392cc2dc207322b2f9788634dbf03eb3

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Citations in the corpus

Future global urban water scarcity and potential solutions (2021, background): “For example, the construction of reservoirs and inter-basin water transfer may cause irreversible damage to river ecosystems and hydrogeology and change the regional climate 4,15,17,21,22 .”
Pervasive human-driven decline of life on Earth points to the need for transformative change (2019, neutral): “These new data reveal that human actions have directly altered at least 70% of land surface (18, 19); 66% of ocean surface is experiencing increasing cumulative impacts (20); around 85% of wetland area has been lost since the 1700s (21), and 77% of rivers longer than 1000 km no longer flow freely fr”
Adapting agriculture to climate change via sustainable irrigation: biophysical potentials and feedbacks (2022, background): “Few large rivers have escaped the ‘hydraulic mission’ of the 20th century [131] and only around 23% of the world’s rivers flow uninterrupted to the ocean [136], making them of great interest for global conservation efforts.”
Linkages between flow regime, biota, and ecosystem processes: Implications for river restoration (2019, neutral): “nightlight intensity in urban areas) (153).”
Scientists’ warning to humanity on the freshwater biodiversity crisis (2020, background): “Freshwater species and ecosystems are increasingly threatened by many human activities, including habitat alteration, water pollution, overfishing, exotic species introduction, river diversions, fragmentation and flow regulation, expansion of agricultural and urban landscapes, climate change, rising”
Microplastics in freshwater fishes: Occurrence, impacts and future perspectives (2021, background): “CONCLUSIONS 478 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 479 DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT 479 REFERENCES 479 their range (Grill et al., 2019).”
Safe and just Earth system boundaries (2023, neutral): “In addition to the effects of substantial flow alteration, there are additional impacts on aquatic ecosystems and ecosystem services associated with water resources infrastructure such as dams and weirs through the reduction in connectivity they cause (Grill et al. 2019).”
Land use and climate change impacts on global soil erosion by water (2015-2070) (2020, background): “These are the dominant processes on upper hill slopes because they are responsible for the largest part of soil displacement on agricultural fields and intensively used grassland (12) and found to be a fair proxy of a wider set of soil erosion processes by water (32).”