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The Global Lakes and Wetlands Database (GLWD)
The Global Lakes and Wetlands Database (GLWD) version 2 provides a comprehensive and seamless global map of inland surface waters distinguished into 33 waterbody and wetland...The Global Lakes and Wetlands Database (GLWD) version 2 provides a comprehensive and seamless global map of inland surface waters distinguished into 33 waterbody and wetland types. GLWD v2 was developed by harmonizing the best available ground- and satellite-based data sources and has been designed to represent the maximum non-overlapping extents of aquatic ecosystems over the broad contemporary period of 1990-2020.
GLWD v2 represents a total of 18.2 million km2 of wetlands at a grid cell resolution of 15 arc-seconds (approximately 500 m at the equator). The data consist of a map of the dominant waterbody or wetland type in each grid cell, as well as 33 individual class layers which represent the sub-cell fraction of each specific class within each grid cell.
Version 2 of GLWD (Lehner et al., 2025) is the successor of the widely-used GLWD version 1 (Lehner & Döll, 2004). The quality, resolution, and format of GLWD v2 significantly improves upon GLWD v1 and supersedes the older version.
