Atlas of Water Science

About This Atlas

This atlas connects open access water research from researchers in CSIRO's Future Water program to the places relevant to its science. Locations can be rivers, landscapes, field sites, facilities, basins or regions. Every mapped point is also assigned to a drainage basin, so papers can be grouped by the water system they share wherever they are in the world.

Reading the map

Research density shades the map by how many study locations fall nearby. Papers the current filters highlight weigh more; the rest stay in the surface, quieter. It is a view of where the collection has looked, not of where water science matters most. Relationship labels sit at the midpoint of each curve from the selected paper and say in a few words what links the two papers. When a link is hydrological, the water feature itself — the connecting Geofabric reaches, the shared river, or the shared or linked drainage basins — is drawn on the map in the same orange as the curve.

Paper summaries and location candidates were extracted with an LLM. Displayed passages are copied from the source PDF text and verified against their page. This verifies the passage, not every scientific interpretation. Approximate anchors and unresolved locations are labelled.

Why do rivers light up?

Hovering or selecting a paper highlights river geography in two different ways, and the panel at the bottom of the map spells out which applies.

Solid dark blue is a river system the paper actually names — for example the Lachlan River. A pale blue shaded basin appears only when a paper gives its study area as a whole basin. In that case there is no specific river to point at, so the basin itself is shaded. The shading is not a claim that the paper studied every river in it. The detailed river network is drawn only once you zoom in to a basin; on the globe it would be noise.

Why so few curves?

At rest the map shows study coordinates without relationship curves. Choosing a paper keeps all of its mapped coordinates emphasized and shows its five strongest links, ranked with shared rivers first, then connected reaches, citations, linked basins and finally subject matter alone; the panel at the foot of the map lets you ask for all of them. Papers the chosen one does not touch step back so its neighbours stand out.

Why are papers linked?

Every paper is turned into a numerical summary of its science, and each one proposes a handful of nearest neighbours. Papers that name the same river are also paired, wherever they are in the world. Only those candidate pairs are examined. A curve is coloured by the strongest relationship that holds: a water relationship between the study areas if there is one, otherwise a citation or subject matter alone. Papers are not linked merely because their locations fall in the same drainage basin. A curve joins the two places the relationship is actually about, so a continental survey that also covers the Murray–Darling links from its Murray–Darling point, not from the far side of the country. Curves are not river paths. Where several papers resolve to exactly the same point — the same named place, or the centroid of a basin they all study whole — their dots are fanned out a little so each can be seen; the paper detail notes the display offset.

Solid orange means both papers name the same river system, though their study extents may differ. Dashed orange means their study areas share a drainage system — either a directed path between their named rivers in the Geofabric network, or one basin draining into the other in HydroBASINS. Neither establishes present flow or exchange between the sampled sites. Dotted grey means the papers are topically close but have no shared water geography at all; where one paper's DOI appears in the other's reference list, the curve is labelled as a citation. Select a paper to inspect these relationships in its detail panel.

Because subject links come from nearest neighbours rather than every possible pair, two topically distant papers will not be linked unless a visible water relationship or citation connects them. Citations are always checked across the whole collection.

The detailed Australian river network uses Geofabric; drainage basins and their topology everywhere use HydroBASINS. Land and lakes are Natural Earth.

Basemap tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors. Global land, lakes, rivers and Australian reference features: Natural Earth, public domain. Map rendering: MapLibre GL JS, BSD-3-Clause.

River geometry is simplified for display. Highlighted named river systems are contextual, not exact surveyed footprints. Geofabric is an experimental research service; topology can be incomplete and does not describe current conditions.

Download the pilot data and provenance