Why connect rivers and watersheds?
A river sample reflects water moving through a landscape. Interpreting its chemistry requires information about the contributing watershed: its geology, climate, soils, land cover, and human activities. Those observations and contextual data often reside in different sources, with different units, methods, and coverage.
The Global RIver-lanD (GRID) project brings river hydrogeochemical observations and watershed information together to support catchment science. GRID-DB refers to the database; GRID also includes research outputs, analysis code, and teaching resources.
What is available now
- A dated inventory and coverage summary describing the scope of GRID’s assembled holdings.
- Released datasets and code for specific river and river–ocean studies, with persistent repository links.
- Teaching resources for investigating water quality and working with environmental data.
- A research community spanning hydrogeochemistry, watershed science, and computational methods.
Each release has its own geographic coverage, variables, methods, and reuse conditions. The inventory totals are not a claim that every observation is available in a single public download.
Scientific questions
GRID supports research on how weathering and human activities shape river chemistry. Questions include how different mineral sources and reactions contribute to alkalinity, sulfate, and salinity; how watershed context helps explain their spatial variation; and how source attribution affects interpretations of weathering-related carbon uptake or release.
Published outputs provide examples of these approaches. Methods and interpretation guidance explain why observations, derived quantities, and predictions must be distinguished.
The next stage
GRID-SI is the proposed development program for better-documented chemistry, reviewed station–catchment links, and reusable computational workflows. Its initial target is a North American reference release, with a bounded test of workflow portability beyond North America. These are development plans, not a claim of an awarded project or completed services.