OS Open Rivers
Here you will find all documentation for the OS Open Rivers product.
OS Open Rivers provides an open dataset of the high-level view of watercourses in Great Britain. OS Open Rivers GIS data contains over 144 000km of water bodies and watercourses map data. These include freshwater rivers, tidal estuaries and canals.
Solve challenges
Model simple what-if scenarios. OS Open Rivers lets you answer questions such as:
Which rivers would be affected by a toxic discharge from this site?
Water quality data
OS Open Rivers lets you tag information with the river IDs used by environment agencies so everybody can use it, ideal for sharing water quality data.
Comprehensive map data
OS Open Rivers GIS data contains over 144 000km of water bodies and watercourses map data. These include freshwater rivers, tidal estuaries and canals.
OS Open Rivers supports a wide range of applications that use geographic information. The product can be used alone or in combination with other Ordnance Survey products, such as Terrain 50 or VectorMap District. OS Open Rivers has numerous applications, including but not limited to, the following examples:
Relating information to the river network for both personal and business use.
Simple analytical queries, for example, the overall lengths of larger rivers in Great Britain.
Simple planning around main watercourses using the detailed connectivity and flow (from source to mouth) information.
Regional-level environmental impact assessments, for example, an indication of what towns have rivers passing through them.
Backdrop mapping.
It is important to note that detailed analysis is not supported in OS Open Rivers; this requires the additional detail and complexity available in OS MasterMap Water Network.
Access: Download
Category: Networks
Data theme: Water
Data structure: Vector – Topologically structured link and node network
Coverage: Great Britain
Scale: 1:15 000 to 1:30 000
Format: ESRI Shapefile, GeoPackage, GML 3.2.1, vector tiles
Ordering area: All of Great Britain
Publication months: April, October
River width requirements
OS Open Rivers does not show the width of a river. For information like this, you will need to use OS MasterMap Water Network Layer.
How to get this product
Access to this OS OpenData product is free through the OS Data Hub.
Sample data
Visualise OS Open Rivers sample data online
This product is available to try out free online using one of our three sets of sample data (Exeter, Newport and Inverness) through the OS MasterMap Product Viewer:
What's next?
To access additional documentation and resources relating to this product, please refer to the following:
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