Global Potential Riparian Zones Estimation

The recently announced Freshwater Challenge (FWC) initiative (https://www.freshwaterchallenge.org/) at the United Nations Water conference, sets an ambitious goal of restoring 300,000 kilometers of degraded rivers and 350 million hectares of degraded wetlands across the globe by 2030. Central to moving towards this goal will be including tangible actions for freshwater and linked ecosystems into supporting country’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs). This in turn relies on the availability and fidelity of geospatial information that can be the basis for planning. The currently available geospatial data that captures accurate delineation of riparian zones, i.e., the transitional semiterrestrial/semiaquatic areas regularly influenced by fresh water, usually extending from the edges of water bodies to the edges of upland communities, must be improved to address the needs highlighted in the Freshwater Challenge. This presentation gives a methodology for deriving a global potential riparian zones layer obtained by processing wetlands, riparian buffers, headwater catchments, layers, assets, and information. We process near real-time land cover dataset from dynamic World (https://dynamicworld.app/), global wetland maps (Tootchi et al., 2019), and High‐Resolution Global Hydrography Maps (Yamazaki et al., 2019; Amatulli et al., 2022) for our analysis. We further explore how this analysis will inform governments around the world on assessing the current state of Riparian Zones as well as estimating benefits from restoration effort, allowing movement towards the goals set by the Freshwater Challenge.