Improved maps of surface water bodies, large dams, reservoirs, and lakes in China

Data and knowledge of surface water bodies (SWB), including large lakes and reservoirs (surface water areas > 1 km2) are critical for the management and sustainability of water resources. However, the existing global or national dam datasets have large georeferenced coordinate offsets for many reservoirs, and some datasets have not reported reservoirs and lakes separately. In this study, we generated China’s surface water bodies, Large Dams, Reservoirs, and Lakes (China-LDRL) dataset by analyzing all available Landsat imagery in 2019 (19,338 images) in Google Earth Engine and very-high spatial resolution imagery in Google Earth. There were ~3.52 × 106 yearlong SWB polygons in China for 2019, only 0.01 × 106 of them (0.43 %) were of large size (> 1 km2). The areas of these large SWB polygons accounted for 83.54 % of the total 214.92 × 103 km2 yearlong surface water area (SWA) in China. We identified 2,140 large dams, including 1,494 reservoir dams and 646 river dams, 1,976 large reservoirs (16.42 × 103 km2), and 3,508 large lakes (75.97 × 103 km2). In general, most of the dams and reservoirs in China were distributed in South China, East China, and Northeast China, whereas most of lakes were located in West China, the Lower Yangtze River Basin, and Northeast China. The provision of the reliable, accurate China-LDRL dataset on dams, large reservoirs and lakes will enhance our understanding of water resources management and water security in China. The China-LDRL dataset is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.16964656.v2 (Wang et al., 2022).