DIASPARA - Habitat database

Continental and marine habitat for diadromous Fishes in Europe, United States and Canadian East coast. These files contain the referentials for river, lakes and catchments from hydrosheds, plus referentials based on hydroshed and ICES and GFCM referentials in the marine area to describe a hierarchy of habitats, for ICES diadromous fish working groups WGNAS, WGBAST and WGEEL.

Versions

Version 0.0.2 (January 2026) (THIS RELEASE)

•   fixed geometry format in parquet for lakes

Version 0.0.1 (December 2025)

• Eventual structural modifications depending on feedback from WGNAS and WGBAST
• Adding referential table for WGEEL

Version 0.0.1-beta (July 2025)

• Beta release for view and test by DIASPARA and WORKING GROUPS.
• Integration with migdb vocabulary.
• Starting the integration of specific tables.
• Adding names to rivers corresponding to ICES vocabularies

Version 0.0.1-pre-beta (mid June 2025)

• Adding referential tables for hierarchical structure
• Structure for WGBAST and WGNAS

Version 0.0.1-alpha (mid February 2025)

• Alpha release for view and test by DIASPARA
• work here : Git issue using the hydrosheds

Download postgres database

#If you don't have postgres, download it, make sure to use the stackbuilder program to download postgis.
# open a shell with command CMD
# Move to the place where you have downloaded the file using the following command
  cd c:/path/to/my/folder
# note psql must be accessible, in windows you can add the path to the postgres 
#bin folder, otherwise you need to add the full path to the postgres bin folder see  link to instructions below    
#below I assume that the user you are using to postgres   
createdb -U postgres diaspara
psql -U postgres diaspara
# this will open a command with # where you can launch the following SQL command
CREATE EXTENSION postgis;
# You will need this because we only restore part of the database : the schema corresponding to different locations.
# Type \q to quit the psql program.

Now you will have saved the files in the c:/path/to/my/folder location where you are currently working.
You need to use pg_restore to restore the files, for instance if you want to use h_med_central.pgc

pg_restore -U postgres -f h_med_central.pgc 

Download Parquet format 

You can use the files straight from R or Qgis. To use with R you will need Arrow and DuckDB packages.

Tutorials

If you need any help to use those, please see the webinar videos and presentation documents that can be found here.

Project page

https://diaspara.bordeaux-aquitaine.inrae.fr

Specific work done by WP3 can be found here.

Description and details about the creation of the Habitat Database can be found here.

Acknowlegment

hydrosheds :

Linke, S., Lehner, B., Ouellet Dallaire, C., Ariwi, J., Grill, G., Anand, M., Beames, P., Burchard-Levine, V., Maxwell, S., Moidu, H., Tan, F., Thieme, M. (2019). Global hydro-environmental sub-basin and river reach characteristics at high spatial resolution. Scientific Data 6: 283. doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-019-0300-6