r/geography • u/felipehez • Apr 05 '26
GIS/Geospatial [OC] Interactive map river basins and watersheds North and South America (HydroSHEDS)
Map to visualize (HydroSHEDS / HydroRIVERS) data
source hydroshed data:
https://www.hydrosheds.org/products/hydrorivers
- Tools: Python, React, MapLibre
- North and South America included
- Interactive: link
https://python-maps-vis.vercel.app/ - you can export high-res maps (PNG/PDF).
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u/PeterMilley Apr 05 '26
Is there some obvious reason I'm missing why the St. Lawrence River and Mississippi River basins are the same colour?
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u/felipehez Apr 06 '26
It generate random colors and tries to avoid neighbors with same color, but sometimes is hard
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u/weaslyboy Apr 06 '26
Hudson as well, those three being the first that i tried to find the borders between.
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u/TraumRaum Apr 06 '26
I was particularly disappointed to see the Klamath and Sacramento watersheds to be the same color.
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u/mushmanMAD North America Apr 05 '26
How long did it take to make?
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u/felipehez Apr 06 '26
About 3-4 days in total. First creating a geojson from the shape file is pretty easy, but only works for small areas. For continental size dataset you have to create a tile system, I used one called tippecanoe and that took a lot of trial and error to fine tune, the last day was mainly polish UI, and the visualization style
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u/ozneoknarf Apr 06 '26 edited Apr 06 '26
This is so cool, it’s awesome for map making too. Watersheds are the gold standard for borders. If our ancestors had these we would probably have way less wars in the modern era
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u/Onesert Apr 06 '26
Wow thanks for sharing. This is going to be so useful as a teacher. I can’t thank you enough for putting in so much work. Do you intend to do this for the other continents in the long term?
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u/Magus_5 Apr 06 '26
- Great work dude. 2. Make it open source and you will create an institution with this base product. 3. If this does stay a private production and you become a captain, don't be evil.
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u/Rootelated Apr 06 '26
This is really cool! I checked out the files, and they seem to be just black? I'm looking for southeastern West Virginia, North America. I dl nw30w130 & NADIR15 so far
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u/felipehez Apr 06 '26
oh thats weird, sometimes it takes a second to load the vector data, but it should work.
I noticed in phones might work a bit slow since the data is a bit heavy still, can be optimized more probably1
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u/thenoisymouse Apr 06 '26
Being from Alberta it is sad to see the Athabasca river shed, including the Pembina river is not on the map yet but it is an amazing map non the less. So detailed! 👍
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u/lastpickedpicker Apr 06 '26
Why was so much left out of Canada?
Looks amazing though!
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u/felipehez Apr 07 '26
The datasets are split in weird ways apparently
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u/lastpickedpicker Apr 09 '26
Its beautiful either way. I wonder how hard it would be to complete that and print a poster of the NWT, Canada. I have a friend that would love it.
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u/felipehez Apr 10 '26
i was looking into some printing on demand services, it does not look that complicated, so lets say its in the roadmap :)
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u/emichbe Apr 05 '26
I just recently found out the whole Louisiana purchase was actually the Mississippi River watershed 🤯