How much inundation occurs in the Amazon River basin?

Abstract

The Amazon River basin harbors some of the world's largest wetland complexes, which are of major importance for biodiversity, the water cycle and climate, and human activities. Accurate estimates of inundation extent and its variations across spatial and temporal scales are therefore fundamental to understand and manage the basin's resources. More than fifty inundation estimates have been generated for this region, yet major differences exist among the datasets, and a comprehensive assessment of them is lacking. Here we present an intercomparison of 29 inundation datasets for the Amazon basin, based on remote sensing only, hydrological modeling, or multi-source datasets, with 18 covering the lowland Amazon basin (elevation 1000 km2) is 323,700 km2. The highest spatial agreement is observed for floodplains dominated by open water such as along the lower Amazon River, whereas intermediate agreement is found along major vegetated floodplains fringing larger rivers (e.g., Amazon mainstem floodplain). Especially large disagreements exist among estimates for interfluvial wetlands (Llanos de Moxos, Pacaya-Samiria, Negro, Roraima), where inundation tends to be shallower and more variable in time. Our data intercomparison helps identify the current major knowledge gaps regarding inundation mapping in the Amazon and their implications for multiple applications. In the context of forthcoming hydrology-oriented satellite missions, we make recommendations for future developments of inundation estimates in the Amazon and present a WebGIS application (https://amazon-inundation.herokuapp.com/) we developed to provide user-friendly visualization and data acquisition of current Amazon inundation datasets.