The DOI matches its Crossref record; 3 of the 3 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Global abundance and size distribution of streams and rivers
Open accessAbstract
To better integrate lotic ecosystems into global cycles and budgets, we provide approximations of the size-distribution and areal extent of streams and rivers. One approach we used was to employ stream network theory combined with data on stream width. We also used detailed stream networks on 2 continents to estimate the fraction of continental area occupied by streams worldwide and corrected remote sensing stream inventories for unresolved small streams. Our estimates of global fluvial area are 485 000 to 662 000 km2 and are +30–300% of published appraisals. Moderately sized rivers (orders 5–9) seem to comprise the greatest global area, with less area covered by low and high order streams, while global stream length, and therefore the riparian interface, is dominated by 1st order streams. Rivers and streams are likely to cover 0.30–0.56% of the land surface and make contributions to global processes and greenhouse gas emissions that may be +20–200% greater than those implied by previous estimates.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
New Global Hydrography Derived from Spaceborne Elevation Data
Lehner, B., Verdin, K., & Jarvis, A. (2008) · Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union · doi:10.1029/2008eo100001 · Cited by 2,411
Denitrification across landscapes and waterscapes: a synthesis
Seitzinger, S., Harrison, J. A., Böhlke, J. K., Bouwman, A. F., Lowrance, R., Peterson, B., Tobias, C., & Drecht, G. V. (2006) · Ecological Applications · doi:10.1890/1051-0761(2006)016[2064:dalawa]2.0.co;2 · Cited by 1,679
Sediment organic carbon burial in agriculturally eutrophic impoundments over the last century
Downing, J. A., Cole, J. J., Middelburg, J. J., Striegl, R. G., Duarte, C. M., Kortelainen, P., Prairie, Y. T., & Laube, K. A. (2008) · Global Biogeochemical Cycles · doi:10.1029/2006gb002854 · Cited by 519
Self-citation
Cited by
Global carbon dioxide emissions from inland waters
Raymond, P. A., Hartmann, J., Lauerwald, R., Sobek, S., McDonald, C., Hoover, M., Butman, D., Striegl, R., Mayorga, E., Humborg, C., et al. (2013) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature12760 · Cited by 2,553
The ecology and biogeochemistry of stream biofilms
Battin, T. J., Besemer, K., Bengtsson, M. M., Romani, A. M., & Packmann, A. I. (2016) · Nature Reviews Microbiology · doi:10.1038/nrmicro.2016.15 · Cited by 1,163
Biggs, J., von Fumetti, S., & Kelly-Quinn, M. (2017) · Hydrobiologia · doi:10.1007/s10750-016-3007-0 · Cited by 594
Variability in organic carbon reactivity across lake residence time and trophic gradients
Evans, C. D., Futter, M. N., Moldan, F., Valinia, S., Frogbrook, Z., & Kothawala, D. N. (2017) · Nature Geoscience · doi:10.1038/ngeo3051 · Cited by 169
Allen, G. H., & Pavelsky, T. M. (2015) · Geophysical Research Letters · doi:10.1002/2014gl062764 · Cited by 160
Metadata
- Authors
- Downing, J.
- Venue
- Inland Waters
- Publisher
- Freshwater Biological Association
- Published
- 2012-10-01
- Volume
- 2
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 229-236
- ISSN
- 2044-2041 (ISSN-L)
- 2044-205X
- OpenAlex
- W2147347890
- Cited by
- 403
- References
- 3
- FWCI
- 7.79
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Global abundance and size distribution of streams and rivers. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.5268/iw-2.4.502
- The paper
- Downing, J. (2012). Global abundance and size distribution of streams and rivers. Inland Waters. https://doi.org/10.5268/iw-2.4.502
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.