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 0.0.3 (march 2026) (THIS RELEASE)

• fixed issue of corrupted format when trying to restore files (for gpc files) tested on server postgres 17.0

Version 0.0.2 (January 2026)

•   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 we 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.You will probably want to create roles, if not it's not a problem you'll get some warnings that grants were not created for this user

You need to have these schema ready to restore the content of some tables

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

If you want to restore everything in one go use :

This will restore all schemas for different ICES areas plus the habitat tables in schema ref, refbast, refnas and refeel

If you are just interested in a limited set of areas :

The first file to restore is habitat. This is necessary as all tables inherit from habitat.

Then if for instance if you want to use h_med_central.pgc use :

all_ref.gpc contains the code for schema ref, refnas, refeel, refbast (habitats for the three working groups) :

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