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## Rivers + lake centerlines

Single-line drainages including optional lake centerlines and supplementary data for North America and Europe.
Download rivers and lake centerlines (1.61 MB) version 4.1.0
Download with scale ranks + tapering (1.71 MB) version 4.1.0
Download North America supplement (793.34 KB) version 4.1.0
Download Europe supplement (500.21 KB) version 4.1.0

About

Rivers primarily derive from World Data Bank 2. Double line rivers in WDB2 were digitized to created single line drainages. All rivers received manual smoothing and position adjustments to fit shaded relief generated from SRTM Plus elevation data, which is more recent and (presumably) more accurate.

Lake centerlines obtained by manually drawing connecting segments in reservoirs. When available, Admin 0 and 1 political boundaries in reservoirs serve as the lake centerlines.

Ranked by relative importance. Includes name and line width attributes for creating tapered drainages.

(below) Congo River basin, Africa.

Avoid data dump overload!

(below) Quebec, Canada in Natural Earth compared to Digital Chart of the World.

Includes scale ranks (large rivers, small rivers):

(below) Southern United States. Note: Extra North America and Europe rivers can be previewed in the “Supplemental Data” section below.

Supplemental Data
North America and Europe only.

(below) For maps of local areas, showing more rivers can be appropriate. The “basic” rivers work well at scales to about 1:30,000,000, good for maps that need to include rives as a general reference mixed with other data themes. If your map is about rivers in particular, or is at 1:5 million to 1:20m scale, add Natural Earth’s “supplementary” river data, now available for North America and Europe only.

The supplemental data provides four times the number of features, at the same level of generalization as the “basic” feature set. The North America supplement includes river tapering (thanks Preston!). The Europe supplement does not (we can show you how).

Supplemental Data – Europe

Data primarily derives from Catchment Characterisation and Modelling (CCM) Database 2.1 by the European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute for Environment and Sustainability. For information about this product and the source data, see http://ccm.jrc.ec.europa.eu.

The modified CCM rivers and lakes offered here are intended for small-scale cartographic use. Only a portion of CCM data is used, representing major rivers and lakes (classes 4 and 5 in the MAINDRAIN attributes column). Generalization and smoothing were applied to these selected data—the CCM vectors contain 9 percent of the data points found in the original source data.

Seamlessly merging CCM rivers and lakes with the existing Natural Earth base data required many adjustments. CCM rivers that coincided with Natural Earth rivers were mostly deleted. In a few cases where the existing Natural Earth data were found egregiously incorrect, the CCM data replaced the Natural Earth data.

The remaining CCM data were fitted Natural Earth rivers, lakes, coastlines, glaciers, political boundaries, and shaded relief derived from SRTM Plus. The positional adjustments were minor given the 1:10 million-scale of the data. In addition, the headwaters of some CCM rivers were clipped slightly downstream to provide visual separation with other river headwaters and to avoid the crests of ridges on the shaded relief.

River and lake name attributes derive from the CCM. Natural Earth contributors assigned the other attributes, including Stroke Weight, Feature Class, Scale Rank, and Feature Number.

Copyright and Terms of Use
Supplemental Data – Europe

The supplementary (scale ranks 9 to 12) European rivers and lakes included with Natural Earth are in the public domain and supplementary attribution to the European Commission is optional.

They are derived, using simple generalization algorithms (quote..), with permission, from the Catchment Characterisation and Modelling (CCM) Database 2.1 (July 2008) by the European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute for Environment and Sustainability. The original, 100 meter resolution and topological consistent CCM linework is available for non-commercial use. More information »

Contact: Jürgen Vogt (+ 39)0332 785481, juergen.vogt(at)jrc.ec.europa.eu.

An exception to the above: Icelandic rivers and the tributaries of the Pechora and Usa rivers of Russia derive from Digital Chart of the World, which is entirely in the public domain.

Supplemental Data – North America

(above) Data derives the North American Environmental Atlas, a collaboration of government agencies in Canada, Mexico and the United States and the trilateral Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC). More information »

Seamlessly merging CEC rivers and lakes with the existing Natural Earth base data required many adjustments. CEC rivers that coincided with Natural Earth rivers were mostly deleted. In a few cases where the existing Natural Earth data were found egregiously incorrect, the CEC data replaced the Natural Earth data.

The remaining CEC data were fitted Natural Earth rivers, lakes, coastlines, glaciers, political boundaries, and shaded relief derived from SRTM Plus. These positional adjustments were minor given the 1:10 million-scale of the data. In addition, the headwaters of some CEC rivers were clipped slightly downstream to provide visual separation with other river headwaters and to avoid the crests of ridges on the shaded relief.

River and lake name attributes derive from the CEC. Natural Earth contributors assigned the other attributes, including Stroke Weight, Feature Class, Scale Rank, and Feature Number.

Copyright and Terms of Use
Supplemental Data – North America

The supplementary (scale ranks 9 to 12) North America rivers and lakes included with Natural Earth are in the public domain and supplementary attribution to the Commission for Environmental Cooperation is optional (metadata).

Issues

Does not include intermittent rivers (eg: large seasonal rivers in Australia draining to Lake Eyre playas). Rivers in northeastern Russia and parts of the Amazon basin have suspect alignments.

Includes some canals (Panama, Suez) but not others (California Aqueduct, Erie Canal, Grand Canal in China, to name a few).

Version History

- 4.1.0
- 4.0.0
- 3.0.0
- 2.0.0
- 1.4.0
- 1.3.0
- 1.2.0
- 1.1.0
- 1.0.0

The master changelog is available on Github »