A collaborative perspective on a globally standardised river basin name database
Authors/Creators
- 1. FIZ Karlsruhe - Leibniz-Institut fur Informationsinfrastruktur GmbH Berlin
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2.
Freie Universität Berlin
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3.
Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries
- 4. Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB)
Description
This repo hosts materials related to a talk given on 24 September 2026 in the session "SYM37 A consensus taxonomic reference for improved freshwater biodiversity data and knowledge" at TDWG 2026 in Oslo.
Abstract
When categorising and aggregating data across a given landscape, Earth scientists tend to use grids, broad geographic delineations such as continents, or administrative units such as countries, counties or states. However, when the environmental characteristics and energy flows in a given region come into focus, then the drainage basin becomes an appropriate spatial unit. This is because of the topographic structure of the landscape along rivers, streams, lakes and wetlands that are laterally and longitudinally connected. Especially in light of global change, spatially pinpointing and being able to search a certain drainage basin by name - e.g. to analyse the observed and projected changes - represents a task that is important for the study of biodiversity as well as for neighbouring areas such as transnational water management. To date, though, a comprehensive and globally standardised resource of basin names is missing.
In this contribution, we will outline how such a resource could be developed, maintained and refined collaboratively on the basis of the Wikimedia and OpenStreetMap platforms and their respective communities. The Wikimedia ecosystem comprises of a suite of interconnected open collaborative platforms that already cover multiple facets of both river basins and biodiversity and that are multilingual. Wikidata in particular is a repository of semantic web-compatible general reference information whose entries include river basins, taxa, territorial entities, ecological concepts and scientific publications about any of these. Wikidata and its sister sites are also closely integrated with OpenStreetMap and citizen science efforts, and Wikidata identifiers are widely used in scholarly contexts and frequently mapped to entries in other relevant databases.