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A database developed by the Global Dam Watch (GDW) consortium is set to transform the global understanding of dams and reservoirs.

Coordinated and led by members of a research lab at McGill University, the database integrates existing global datasets to provide the most comprehensive resource for large-scale analyses to date. The research is published in the journal Scientific Data.

River barriers, ranging from large dams to small locks, weirs, or barrages, play an essential role in water supply, flood control, hydro-electric power production and navigation, but also have ecological consequences, including fragmenting river ecosystems and disrupting sediment flow. With the GDW database, researchers and policy-makers can perform large-scale analyses of these trade-offs, leading to more sustainable and better informed water-management practices.

"The scale and depth of the data will facilitate analyses that were previously impossible, helping to strike a balance between harnessing water resources for human use and protecting the ecosystems that rely on these rivers," said Bernhard Lehner, an Associate Professor in McGill's Department of Geography, who oversaw the database project in his research lab over the past three years.

Of the 41,145 dams in the GDW database, 450 are in Canada, with over one-third of those built primarily for hydro power production. While these dams represent just one percent of the records in the database, they impound some of the largest reservoirs in the world and provide about 11 percent of the total global water storage capacity, highlighting Canada's significant role in stewarding the world's fresh water.

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