Welcome to the GeoFRESH platform


GeoFRESH is a platform that helps freshwater researchers to process point data across the global river network by providing a set of spatial tools.

Follow the demo or upload your csv-table that contains geographic coordinates. GeoFRESH allows you to

  • map your points,
  • move points to the nearest stream network segment,
  • delineate upstream catchments of each point,
  • extract a suite of environmental attributes across the catchment,
  • and download the data for further analyses.

GeoFRESH is based on the Hydrography90m stream network . For more information, please see the publication and hydrography.org regarding the single data layers.

For further analyses of your freshwater data, you can use the hydrographr R package that facilitates the download and data processing of the Hydrography90m data ( publication in Methods in Ecology and Evolution , website with details and examples, source code on GitHub ).

For a detailed description of the platform and the workflow, please refer to the GeoFRESH publication :

    Domisch, S., Bremerich, V., Buurman, M., Kaminke, B., Tomiczek, T., Torres-Cambas, Y., Grigoropoulou, A., Garcia Marquez, J. R., Amatulli, G., Grossart, H. P., Gessner, M. O., Mehner, T., Adrian, R. & De Meester, L. (2024). GeoFRESH – an online platform for freshwater geospatial data processing. International Journal of Digital Earth, 17, (1). https://doi.org/10.1080/17538947.2024.2391033 .

Analysis

Check out the different analysis steps.

Tutorial

Check out the full functionality of the platform.

Documentation

Learn about the project background.

Analysis workflow

The GeoFRESH platform allows to upload point data, snap (move) the points to the stream network, query upstream environmental information, and download the resulting table.

Currently the platform includes 48 variables related to topography and hydrography, 19 climate variables, (i.e., current bioclimatic variables), 15 soil variables and 22 land cover variables.

For the uploaded points, you will obtain
   i) one table per environmental variable, where each row corresponds to one point, followed by the ID of the sub-catchment where the point falls into, and the summary statistics of the variable within this sub-catchment
   ii) a table including summary statistics for the upstream catchment of each point

In the case that variables were scaled in the raster layers, we have rescaled them back to their original values in the tables.

Upload and snap

Please provide your point data as a .csv table with three columns: a unique 'id', 'latitude', 'longitude'.

Coordinates should be provided in the WGS84 coordinate reference system. Column names are flexible. The number of points in your .csv file is currently limited to 1000, and upload file size should not exceed 1MB.

Map

Select environmental variables

Select environmental variables

Activate the checkboxes to select the required environmental information that should be summarized within the upstream catchment of each point. Please see the source and the citation for each category under the 'Documentation' tab.

Processing...

Query selected environmental variables for the local sub-catchment (min, max, mean, sd)

Local sub-catchment


Processing...

Query selected environmental variables for the upstream catchment of each point (mean of sub-catchment means)

Upstream catchment


Plot results

Plot results of environmental variables queries as histograms for topography, climate and soil or boxplots for land cover.

Get routing info

UNDER development: the routing info module will be added soon!

Step by step guide to GeoFRESH

Upload your data

This tutorial walks though the single steps of GeoFRESH using the test data set (random selection of fish occurrences, drawn from the Harmonised freshwater fish occurrence and abundance data for 12 federal states in Germany, downloaded from GBIF.

Point data coordinates need to be uploaded as a comma-separated table (.csv) with the three columns ID, latitude and longitude (column names are flexible). Latitude and longitude coordinates are required to be in the WGS84 coordinate reference system.

The points are instantly visualized on the map.