Environment90m – globally standardized environmental variables for freshwater science at high spatial resolution

Abstract. The current loss of freshwater biodiversity calls for immediate action, including the mobilisation of existing data and tools to support long-term conservation. Yet, establishing a global baseline for the spatial distribution of freshwater habitats and the biodiversity they host remains difficult. Such task would require standardized, high-resolution environmental information to characterise freshwater habitats anywhere in the world. To address this challenge, we present the Environment90m dataset, which aggregates a large number of environmental layers into each of the 726 million sub-catchments of the Hydrography90m dataset, corresponding to single stream segments. Specifically, Environment90m includes 45 variables related to topography and hydrography, 19 climate variables for the observation period of 1981–2010, as well as projections for 2041–2070 and 2071–2100 under the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) 1.26, 3.70 and 5.85, and three global circulation models (UKESM1-0-LL, MPI-ESM1-2-HR and IPSL-CM6A-LR). Moreover, Environment90m includes 22 land cover categories for the annual time-series data from 1992–2020. In addition, we provide 15 soil variables and information on aridity and modelled streamflow. Summary statistics (i.e., mean, min, max, range, sd) are provided for all continuous variables, while for categorical data, the proportion of each category is calculated within each of the sub-catchments. The data is available at https://hydrography.org/environment90m (last access: 4 February 2026). To facilitate data download and processing, we provide dedicated functions within the hydrographr R-package, and extend these also to new functions for processing upstream data of lakes. For all underlying calculations, we used the open-source tools GDAL/OGR, GRASS-GIS and AWK, so that custom data can be easily generated using the hydrographr R-package. Environment90m, along with the tools, provides an array of opportunities for research and application in spatial freshwater biodiversity science, specifically biogeographic analyses and conservation exercises in freshwater ecosystems. The metadata of the Environment90m dataset is stored at https://doi.org/10.18728/igb-fred-995.0 (García Márquez et al., 2025a).