CRAD: A China Reservoir Attribute Database for Hydrological and Water Resources Applications

Abstract. Dams and reservoirs are essential infrastructure for water security and have wide-ranging climatic and environmental impacts. China possesses the world’s largest number of reservoirs, yet existing databases suffer from a severe lack of attribute information, constraining robust assessments of reservoir functions and their broader resource and environmental impacts. To bridge this gap, we developed the China Reservoir Attribute Database (CRAD) by integrating existing global and regional databases, with attribute information retrieved from government documents, enterprise and professional association materials, academic publications, online encyclopedias, and other web-based sources. Through spatial deduplication, source-prioritized data integration, and multilevel quality control, CRAD compiles more than 20 attributes for 5,142 reservoirs, including geographic location, completion year, dam length and height, reservoir area, storage capacity, catchment area, construction purpose, hydropower capacity, and irrigated area. CRAD captures 87.5 % of China’s total reservoir storage capacity and 62.0 % of its installed hydropower capacity, representing a substantial advance over Global Dam Watch (GDW), currently the most attribute-complete global dam and reservoir database. CRAD supports a wide range of hydrological, water resource, climatic, and environmental modeling applications. It identifies 41.3 % of China’s irrigated grid cells as potentially reservoir-served, compared with only 3.5 % using GDW, and improves streamflow simulations at nearly 70 % of the gauging stations. Overall, CRAD provides a substantially improved data foundation for representing reservoir regulation and assessing its hydrological, agricultural, climatic and environmental impacts in China. The CRAD database is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23116980 (Liang et al., 2026).