GRIT-ADB: A Global Hydro-Environmental Attributes Database for the GRIT Hydrography

Global hydro-environmental databases provide essential information for large-scale hydrological, ecological, and environmental analyses. Most existing global databases are built upon convergent river representations that do not explicitly capture bifurcating river systems. In addition, these databases primarily rely on long-term climatology or static summaries of environmental conditions derived from legacy datasets, limiting their applicability for analyses of hydroclimatic and geomorphological processes. Here we present GRIT-ADB, a new global hydro-environmental database tied to the vectorised Global River Topology (GRIT) database at 30 m resolution that provides a topology-explicit and physically realistic representation of river networks including divergent flow pathways. GRIT-ADB provides standardised hydro-environmental information for 19.6 million km of global streams and rivers. The database comprises around 60 time-varying and static attributes spanning five categories: hydrology, physiography, climate, land cover and use, and soils and geology. Hydro-environmental attributes are derived by aggregating and harmonising data from state-of-the-art global datasets and are accumulated along the river network from headwaters to basin outlets while preserving the topology of divergent flow pathways. The attributes are linked to multiple GRIT scales, including hierarchically-nested subbasins, individual 1km river reaches, and coarser-scale river segments (several kilometres long). By combining a standardised attribute framework with explicit representation of bifurcating river hydrography, GRIT-ADB enables improved large-scale analyses of river connectivity, hydrological extremes, hydro-ecological processes, and environmental change in complex river systems, supporting a wide range of global hydrological and environmental applications.