Published September 8, 2025 | Version version 2
Dataset Open

The watershed boundaries of large river and water management basins of Kazakhstan

Authors/Creators

  • 1. National Laboratory Astana, Nazarbayev University

Description

The dataset contains the ArcGIS shapefiles of watershed boundaries large regional river basins of Kazakhstan and Central Asia, and water management basins of Kazakhstan. The archived dataset has four folders:  A) North Central Asia v2a with watershed boundaries of 1) Zhaiyk-Caspian, 2) Tobyl, 3) Torgai, 4) Sarysu, 5) Nura, 6) Vagay, 7) Yesil, 8)Yesil-Ertis closed basin, 9) Ertis 10) Ob-Ertis closed basin; B) Southern Central Asia v3a with waterhsed boundaries 11) Amu Darya-Aral,  12) Syr Darya-Aral, 13) Shu-Talas, 14) Ily-Balkhash-Alakol; C)Hydro-regions: the merged boundaries of (A) North Region and (B) South Region. These basin boundaries are based on HydroAtlas (levels 3-5) https://www.hydrosheds.org/hydroatlas. D) The boundaries of  water management basins of Kazakhstan: Aral-Syr Darya, Balkhash-Alakol, Ertis, Nura-Sarysu, Shu-Talas, Tobyl-Torgai, Yesil, Zhaiyk-Caspian. 

The updated version (2) has water management basins with attribute tables cleaned up. And 4 versions of basin shapefiles. The
ID's are the same as in the paper Yapiyev et. al., 2025.
Attribute tables are cleaned up and areas are added:
1) All basins merged into single file + North basins as a single file + South basins as a single file
2) All basins are saved as separate shapefiles in one folder
3) North basins are saved separately in one folder
4) South basins are saved separately in one folder
Folder 6: visualization version, only Zhaiyk-Caspian is different (without small islands and peninsulas). Other basins are taken from 1).
 
Updated dataset folder structure: 
 
01_water_management_basins_kz 
02_central_asian_basins
03_central_asian_basins_separately
04_north_ca_basins_separately
05_south_ca_basins_separately
06_for_visualization
 

This dataset is a supplementary data to the article

Yapiyev, Vadim, Nurlan Ongdas, Zarina Saidaliyeva, Abdikaiym Zhiyenbek, Tomiris Smogulova, Marzhan Baigaliyeva, and Egor Prikaziuk. 2025. “Baseline Information and Regionalization of the Large River Basins of Kazakhstan.” Frontiers in Water 7: 1601671. doi:10.3389/frwa.2025.1601671 

Files

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Additional details

Funding

Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Kazakhstan
AP23489867

References

  • 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