Journal:

Type of paper:
Date:
Version:
DOI:
Note:

Environmental Modelling & Software

Short communication
June 16, 2014
v25
10.1016/j.envsoft.2014.07.006
Submitted version

Rapid setup of hydrological and hydraulic models using OpenStreetMap and the
SRTM derived digital elevation model
J. Schellekens a,b,1, R.J. Brolsma a, R.J. Dahm a, G.V. Donchyts a,c, H.C. Winsemius a
Deltares, Boussinesqweg 1, 2629 HV Delft, the Netherlands
Critical Zone Hydrology Group, VU University, De Boelelaan 1087, 1081 HV, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
c
Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Delft University of Technology, Stevinweg 1, 2628 CN, Delft, the
Netherlands
a
b

Abstract
A stepwise procedure has been developed in Python to extract information from
OpenStreetMap (OSM) for hydrological and hydraulic models using existing and newly
developed tools. The procedure focuses on the extraction of paved areas and water bodies.
Road density is used to fill in gaps in OSM polygon coverage. Furthermore, it includes
automatic downloading of Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) elevation data and
improving the elevation model with man-made landscape features such as elevated roads
that are sampled from OSM. This is useful for hydraulic modelling in data scarce flood plain
areas, where sharp elevation differences are dominated by man-made elevated elements.
Test cases in Europe, South East Asia and East Africa demonstrate the potential of the
procedure, although large differences in completeness of OSM coverage suggest it is best
used in combination with other data sources.
Keywords: Hydrological models, OpenStreetMap, Rapid Assessment Tools
Software availability
The codes and

tools

developed

in

this

research

are

freely

available

via

http://osm2hydro.googlecode.com/. The set of tools is named osm2hydro and is part of the

Deltares OpenEarth initiative (de Boer et al., 2012). The tools are developed in Python, an
interactive, object-oriented, extensible programming language, (http://www.python.org) in
combination with GDAL, a geospatial data abstraction library (http://www.gdal.org) and
PCRaster, a library for the development of environmental models (http://www.pcraster.eu).

1 Corresponding author: J. Schellekens, Deltares, Rotterdamseweg 185, 2629 HD Delft, the Netherlands,
Phone: +31883358223, Fax: +31883358582, E-mail: jaap.schellekens@deltares.nl

1. Introduction
Hydrological and hydraulic models often rely on land cover maps to determine surface
model parameters. Improving those maps, specifically the placement and amount of paved
area which generates a large proportion of quick runoff and water bodies, can ultimately
lead to better hydrological models. Furthermore, hydraulic and hydrological models are
strongly dependent on the quality of elevation data (see e.g. Sanders, 2007). Trends in data
sharing activities like Landsat 8 (http://landsat.usgs.gov/landsat8.php), OpenTopography
(http://opentopography.org), and CKAN (http://ckan.org/instances) have opened new
possibilities for rapid setup of hydrological and hydraulic models in the last decade. Satellite
data provides information on a global scale that is consistent in space although they usually
require complex algorithms for extraction of hydrographic features, and treatments for noise
reduction. The quality of these data sources is continuously increasing. Merging these with
detailed auxiliary data sources may relieve the amount of manual intervention needed and
ultimately result in faster model set up. In contrast to remote sensing data, crowdsourcing
activities may provide better quality data when it comes to geospatial feature detection and
may provide a good and autonomously growing auxiliary data source. However, crowd
sourced data will be much less consistent in space. Using this concept Fritz et al. (2012)
showed how Geo-Wiki can help improve global land cover data by including more in-situ
data. For many applications, such as flood forecasting and disaster mapping, up-to-date
coverage is important which may be difficult to achieve using traditional mapping (e.g.
Annoni et al., 2010; Butler, 2013; Manfr et al., 2012; McDougall and Temple-Watts, 2012).
OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a rapidly growing, crowd sourced, mapping initiative (Haklay
and Weber, 2008). It includes an impressive amount of information, most notably on manmade features. Although coverage and consistency varies widely between geographic areas,
the detail of built up areas may exceed that of traditional land-use/cover sources such as the
Corine land cover map for Europe (Bossard et al., 2000; Heymann et al., 1994). However,
many gaps remain in the coverage of OSM (Ciepluch et al., 2010; Girres and Touya, 2010;
Mooney et al., 2010; Neis et al., 2011; Zielstra and Zipf, 2010) indicating that the use of OSM
as a substitute for traditional land-cover maps is not yet possible. Substitution may even
never be possible in areas that are not attractive for investments in OSM (Haklay, 2010). In
addition, poor tagging of features by individuals and during bulk imports of external data
sources (Mooney and Corcoran, 2011) may hinder application in environmental modelling.
Our objective is to develop and demonstrate a stepwise procedure to extract information
from OSM for hydrological and hydraulic models using existing and newly developed tools to
2

supplement other data sources. The rationale behind the automated procedure is that it
provides a means to rapidly setup suitable building blocks for hydrological and hydraulic
models from global and freely available data. The procedure is tested for robustness by
applying it on several locations and catchments of different size world-wide.
In section 2 we present the procedure while section 3 focusses on applications in Europe
South East Asia and East Africa and on different hydrological scales. Section 4 provides a
discussion on the developed approach and section 5 presents our main conclusions and
ideas for future research.
2. Methods
In short, the procedure first clips a region of interest from an OSM file, creates shape
files from selected features and uses these to create gridded maps with fraction of paved
area, fraction of open water and fraction of unpaved area in each cell. This information can
be used directly by distributed hydrological models that operate on a grid or aggregated to
larger areas for the use in lumped or semi distributed models. The tools furthermore
automatically download elevation data from the Shuttle Topography Radar Mission, which
can subsequently be used in conjunction with OSM river reaches to establish a sound river
network topology with connection nodes and profiles for 1D hydraulic modelling, as well as a
filtered elevation map for 2D inundation modelling. The procedure has been packaged in a
free and open-source library written in Python called osm2hydro.
In more detail the developed method in osm2hydro to extract land use maps is divided
in the following steps (Figure 1 shows the flow chart of the tools):
1. Cut-out a specific region for the model from the downloaded OSM file (osmconvert, a
standard

tool

which

we

use

unaltered

and

available

through

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Osmconvert)
2. Convert the OSM file to a set of polygon and line shape files and filter for relevant land
uses (ogr2ogr, part of the GDAL library)
3. Convert the shape files to a set of two resolution grids going from high to low to be able
to get a fraction in each cell in the final grids. (gdal_density.py, a wrapper around
gdal_rasterize). By default the high-resolution grids cell size is 1/10 of the final
resolution.
4. Perform corrections on the grids (normalize) and shapes and merge the grids to the final
land cover products (osm2hydro.py)

Figure 1 Flow chart of the steps taken to derive land use (and specifically paved area fraction) maps
from OSM.

In some areas the different land use (LU) polygons in OSM nearly cover the whole area.
As such, the LU polygons derived from OSM can be used to generate the paved, unpaved
and water covered area maps we are aiming to derive. However, in most areas the polygon
coverage is (very) incomplete. From visual inspection it appears that roads (line elements)
are mapped more frequently in OSM than polygon features of paved areas. Therefore, we
have used road density as an extra parameter to come to a best estimate of the fraction of
paved area in larger areas. The road density map is used to generate an urban area map for
all cells that have a road density higher than a certain threshold. For the test cases we have
determined this threshold as the top 98% percentile of the road density distribution for the
area under consideration. If a grid cell is marked as urban area a paved area fraction of 80%
is assigned. Next, this map is merged with the paved area map that is determined from the
polygons in OpenStreetMap.

Two other maps are also created, one representing the fraction of unpaved land use and
one representing the fraction of open water. The fraction unpaved is derived from polygons
that represent green areas. The open water fraction map is derived from a combination of
all waterways in OSM, taking into account the river width if it is available, and land use
classified as water. The combined water maps are assigned a maximum value of 1.0 to filter
out double counting of waterways and water polygons that represent the same water body..
Additionally, we created a procedure to use OSM data in the schematisation of a
hydraulic inundation model. OSM line elements that represent elevated landscape features
are burnt onto an elevation map. We use the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) 90
meter elevation map (Jarvis et al., 2008). Such landscape features are essential to include in
hydraulic inundation models as they may block floods and reroute water in other directions.
The steps to produce the sound drainage network and the smoothed elevation map are as
follows:
1.

SRTM data is downloaded for the user-defined target area. Tiles are automatically
merged and the exact coordinates extracted at the full 90 m resolution.

2.

A smoothed DEM is prepared using a bi-orthogonal wavelet filter, following Falorni

et al. (2005). The wavelet filter is preferred over a typical low-pass filter as it will
filter out high frequency information, assumed to be noise, while preserving lowfrequency information, assumed to be real elevation features. The user can
configure the filter weight. After filtering, the DEM is resampled to the user-defined
required resolution for 2D inundation modelling.

3.

OSM line elements that represent elevated landscape features are burnt onto the
resampled elevation map. Although a feature may be much smaller than a pixel in
the resampled elevation map, the full pixel will be elevated up to the maximum
height of the elevated feature. This is to ensure that the elevated pixels form a
realistic obstruction to the flow of water within the hydraulic simulations. The user
can configure the maximum height of elevated features. This information needs to
be collected in the field by the user to ensure realistic values are chosen.

4.

River features from OSM are burnt into the original DEM (as prepared in step 1).
This procedure ensures that known river reaches from OSM are followed when the
drainage map is derived. The burnt-in DEM is only used to derive drainage
directions (see next step). For 2D inundation modelling, the user will rely on the
DEM derived in step 2.

5.

A drainage map across the complete domain is prepared using the burnt-in DEM.

6.

A gridded drainage network is prepared by including all river sections that have a
Strahler order above a user-defined threshold. In each considered pixel, an
assumed rectangular cross section is prepared following the geomorphological
relationship of Finnegan et al. (2005). The user must provide an estimate of the
width/depth ratio, yearly average and bank full flow at the outlet of the catchment.
The channel geometries are scaled to the whole drainage network based on
upstream area and local slope of each upstream pixel.

7.

The gridded drainage network map is converted to a number of shapefiles, that

can be used for 1D hydraulic modelling:
a. A line shapefile containing the drainage network
b. A point shapefile containing cross-sections at user-defined spacing,
measured in an amount of pixels
c. A point shapefile containing the downstream location of each river reach
along with the upstream area
d. A polygon shapefile, containing for each reach a polygon for the upstream
contributing surface area

3. Results and discussion

We applied the different components of our methods to six cases. The cases range from
highly urbanised catchments (Singapore; Meuse basin in Europe; City of Arnhem, The
Netherlands; Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) province in Vietnam) and rural areas (Limpopo delta;
Chao Phraya basin), see Table 1. For the first four case studies, paved-area fractions were
established.

Table 1 Case studies used in this research

No
1
2
3
4
5

Case
Meuse basin
Ho Chi Minh City province
Arnhem
Stamford
Limpopo basin

Chao Phraya basin

Area (km2)
29,460
2,115
57
4.6
415,000
160,000

Country
France, Belgium, the Netherlands
Vietnam
The Netherlands
Singapore
Mozambique (only downstream area is
considered)
Thailand (area upstream of Bangkok)

shows scatter plots of spatially averaged paved-area fractions of local data sources, as
compared to OSM-based paved-area fractions. For the Meuse basin (upper-left) we
compared our results with the Corine data set (Bossard et al., 2000) across a subdivision of
thirteen sub-catchments. In the processing steps an intermediate resolution of 100x100m
was used; the final paved area fractions were aggregated to 1x1km. In most cases the OSM
initial guess (i.e. only polygons), underestimated the paved area considerably. However, by
including the roads and the road density algorithm the OSM best guess is close to Corine.
Both estimates show the same trend in which the amount of paved area increases from
about 4% in the southern part to about 19% in the northern part of the Meuse catchment. In
general, OSM gives higher values for areas with a relatively low paved area fraction and
lower values when the paved area percentage is high.
For the city of Arnhem ( upper-right), we calculated the paved fraction based on road
and building density. These values have been compared to the original detailed data from
the Dutch Cadastre and the Corine land cover data. Here, our method generally
overestimates the paved fraction. The main reasons for this are the estimation of the map
average road widths, which in reality differs between neighbourhoods and the simplification
of separate houses to building blocks in OSM in this region. The lower part of (lower-left:
Singapore, lower-right: HCMC) shows an evident underestimation of OSM derived paved
fraction land use in comparison to LU maps of local governments in Singapore and HCMC.
The differences between the European cases and the South East Asian cases demonstrated
that large spatial variability of the completeness of OSM coverage. The OSM derived paved
area in Singapore and HCMC is clearly underestimated while the comparison with Corine in
Europe shows that OSM can be fairly accurate compared to traditional data sources. It is
difficult to determine whether OSM has more active contributors in Europe or that high data
density is due to mass import of public and private datasets. For example, in The
Netherlands the high data density is partly due to addition of buildings to OSM from the `The
Netherlands Cadastre, Land Registry and Mapping Agency, as a showcase of an open GIS
7

policy, while in 2007 Automotive Navigation Data (AND) added its road network to OSM
(http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/AND_Data).
In our study we have set the road density threshold over which we assume the area is
urban, to the 98th percentile. This value worked well in all cases we investigated although for
Hi Chi Minh City a lower value 92th) gave better results. This shows that this value
influences the amount of paved area detected considerably and care must be taken to select
the value. As an example of the sensitivity Figure 3 shows the amount of paved area
determined for Ho Chi Minh City using four different thresholds (the 92 nd, 94th, 96th and the
98th percentile). The resulting paved area fractions for the whole HCMC area determined
from the different thresholds ranged from 0.3 (the 98 th percentile) to 0.41 (the 92 nd
percentile).

Figure 2 Comparison of percentage paved area per sub-catchment in OSM (y-axis) and land use data
(x-axis). Upper left: Meuse basin, OSM compared to the Corine data set. Upper right: Arnhem (the
Netherlands), OSM compared to the National Joint Large Scale Standard Map (http://www.gbkn.nl/).
Lower left: Stamford catchment (Singapore), OSM compared to land use map of the local
government. Lower right: Ho Chi Minh City province (Vietnam), OSM compared to the land use map
of the local government. Sub-catchment areas are about 0.1km 2, 1km2, 50km2 and 2000km2 for
Arnhem, Singapore, Hi Chi Minh City and the Meuse catchment respectively.

Figure 3. Sensitivity of parameter that determines over which the road density indicates an area is to
be treated as urban. The area shown is Ho Chi Minh City. Four different values of the threshold are
investigated: the 98 th, 96 th, 94 th and the 92nd percentile.

A more detailed analysis around the cities of Liege and Luxembourg in the Meuse
catchment case demonstrates the importance of including the road network information. The
area around Liege (Figure 4) has a particular poor coverage of the OSM as large areas are
not yet classified. As such, the paved area is severely underestimated as can be seen by
comparing the top-left panel of the figure with the top-right panel. After including the road
density (bottom-left) and the roads themselves the coverage estimated by OSM resembles
the Corine coverage much better (bottom-right). Figure 5 shows results at 100x100m as
obtained for the city of Luxembourg. Here, at its native resolution the Corine fraction is (per
definition) 1 or 0, while the OSM data is able to capture more detail. In addition the smaller
parks in the city are not picked-up in Corine and the ring-road around the city is also not
10

included while in the OSM derived map the paved fraction at this scale for the large roads is
frequently above 0.5. Combining both data sources may provide the best results although
this must be done with care given the large spatial variation in coverage and accuracy.

Figure 4 Example of the area around Liege with a particularly poor OSM coverage. Paved area
determined from Corine (top left), paved area as estimated from OSM coverage indicating paved land
use (top right), paved land use estimated from road density (bottom left) and a merger of the two
OSM-derived estimates

11

Figure 5 Paved area fraction for the Luxembourg area at 100x100m resolution derived from Corine
(top) and OSM (bottom). The road network is shown as an overlay.

The last two cases (Limpopo and Chao Phraya) were used to demonstrate the derivation
of map layers for hydraulic modelling. Figure 6 shows the effect of applying the tools for the
elevation model to the Limpopo delta, Mozambique. Major roads as well as secondary roads
have been elevated in the SRTM coverage over the Limpopo. An exaggerated elevation has
been applied to visualize the results. For hydrological simulations, the real elevation of the
road network within the region of interest should be investigated first.
Furthermore, a river network map and cross-sections were derived for the lower Chao
Phraya River and tributaries in Thailand. Figure 7a displays all waterways that are detected
in OSM and Figure 7b displays the waterways identified as river based on the OSM tag
waterway=river. These line elements were consequently burnt into the 3 arcsec.
resolution elevation data to ensure that known river reaches from OSM are followed in the
derived river network. Note that rivers as mapped in OSM are not sound for hydraulic
modelling, i.e. individual line elements are not properly connected to each other. Therefore, a
sound drainage network was derived from the treated elevation data with burnt-in rivers and
12

converted into a shapefile. The topology of this river network was then used to derive lateral
inflow and confluence points. The resulting network and lateral inflows are shown in Figure
7c.

Figure 6 Elevation data from SRTM over the Limpopo delta. Left: Elevation data without OSM
treatment. Right: elevation data with OSM treatment. The road network is now clearly visible in the
elevation model

Figure 7. Step-wise derivation of drainage network in the lower Chao Phraya River from OSM. a) the
raw OSM waterways. This figure shows all waterways available in OSM. b) Waterways with the OSM
tag waterway=river. These are filtered out from a). c) derived sound drainage network, to be used

13

in hydraulic models. Red lines give the river network and black dots give the confluence points of
laterals..

4. Conclusions and limitations

Although OpenStreetMap (OSM) is certainly not complete in its coverage of the features
that are important for hydrology, it can offer very useful data in kick-starting any hydrological
and hydraulic modelling. In this paper, we have demonstrated osm2hydro, a procedure that
extracts features from OSM and converts these into paved/unpaved area fractions, and in
combination with SRTM into river network topology, as well as a smoothed elevation map
(essential for 2D inundation modelling).

For large areas and high resolution grids the amount of temporary data required as
well as the processing time needed by the tools can be significant. As an example the
Meuse case discussed in this study took 30 minutes to complete for the hydrological
processing on a 2.6Ghz processor (1 min OSM extraction, 20 min shape-file creation,
tag filtering and extraction, and 9 min grid creation, and post processing). The resulting
1x1 km maps are 0.71mb each (uncompressed geotiff) while the intermediate (high
resolution) grids where 0.9 GB each. The total size of the shape files with the filtered
layers was 19GB.
Estimations of paved area fraction in the Meuse basin are comparable to those obtained
using the Corine land use map. To reach an accurate estimation careful processing of the
maps is needed to filter out areas with poor or multiple land use assignment. The inclusion of
road density to estimate urban (paved) areas greatly improves the estimate for areas with
poor OSM polygon coverage. However, the road density threshold over which a cell is
regarded as urban is still dependent on a somewhat arbitrary choice. The inclusion of roads
in peri-urban areas in the paved area fraction provides added value with respect to
traditional land cover maps, since the latter only provide pixel-dominant land use. The
relative importance of the contribution of the road density map to the amount of paved area
as determined by the tools may be used as an estimate of the maturity of OSM in a region.
Assuming the roads are nearly complete, the discrepancy between paved area determined
by the polygons and the road density may be used to determine the maturity of OSM in a
region.

14

As for the derivation of hydraulic model elements, some limitations are that we do not
account for the fact that elevated features are not completely impermeable due to the
presence of culverts and fly-overs, and the fact that our algorithm to derive river networks
can only provide for converging river networks. In diverging areas (e.g. in wetlands and delta
areas) this may result in limitations in the network and some requirement for manual
correction of the topology of the river network. It should also be noted that the SRTM data
has its limitations for hydraulic modelling. In particular in hydraulically complex areas, urban
areas and regions with dense vegetation (see e.g. Valeriano et al., 2006; Wilson et al., 2007)
SRTM may be prone to noise and systematic bias that needs to be accounted for with other
methods than presented in this work. Finally, OpenStreetMap does not provide enough
information on hydraulics in urban areas (such as urban drainage networks, sewerage
systems, pumping schemes and retention basins) to complete a realistic schematisation
within urban areas.
The large variation in completeness of OSM (as demonstrated by the case studies in
urban areas in North West Europe and South East Asia) makes that any application of the
tools must be guided by spot checking using alternative data sources. It also suggests that
using the estimates from OSM (that can be detailed but lack spatial consistency) together
with remotely sensed estimates (that usually have a much better spatial consistency) may be
the best way forward.

Acknowledgements
We acknowledge Rijkswaterstaat under the Ministry of Infrastructure and the
Environment, the Netherlands for their funding of this research.
References
Annoni, A., Craglia, M., de Roo, A., San-Miguel, J., 2010. Earth observations and dynamic
mapping: key assets for risk management, in: Geographic Information and
Cartography for Risk and Crisis Management. Springer, pp. 321.
Bossard, M., Feranec, J., Otahel, J., 2000. CORINE land cover technical guide: Addendum
2000. European Environment Agency Copenhagen.
Butler, D., 2013. Crowdsourcing goes mainstream in typhoon response. Nature.
doi:10.1038/nature.2013.14186
Ciepluch, B., Jacob, R., Mooney, P., Winstanley, A., 2010. Comparison of the accuracy of
OpenStreetMap for Ireland with Google Maps and Bing Maps, in: Proceedings of the
Ninth International Symposium on Spatial Accuracy Assessment in Natural
Resources and Enviromental Sciences 20-23rd July 2010. p. 337.
De Boer, G.J., Baart, F., Bruens, A., Damsma, T., van Geer, P., Grasmeijer, B., den Heijer,
K., van Koningsveld, M., 2012. OpenEarth: using Google Earth as outreach for
15

NCKs data. University of Twente, Department of Water Engineering & Management.

doi:10.3990/2.177
Finnegan, N.J., Roe, G., Montgomery, D.R., Hallet, B., 2005. Controls on the channel width
of rivers: Implications for modeling fluvial incision of bedrock. Geology 33, 229232.
doi:10.1130/G21171.1
Fritz, S., McCallum, I., Schill, C., Perger, C., See, L., Schepaschenko, D., van der Velde, M.,
Kraxner, F., Obersteiner, M., 2012. Geo-Wiki: An online platform for improving global
land cover. Environmental Modelling & Software 31, 110123.
Girres, J.-F., Touya, G., 2010. Quality Assessment of the French OpenStreetMap Dataset.
Transactions in GIS 14, 435459. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9671.2010.01203.x
Haklay, M., 2010. How good is volunteered geographical information? A comparative study
of OpenStreetMap and Ordnance Survey datasets. Environment and planning. B,
Planning & design 37, 682.
Haklay, M., Weber, P., 2008. Openstreetmap: User-generated street maps. Pervasive
Computing, IEEE 7, 1218.
Heymann, Y., Commission of the European Communities, Directorate-General for
Environment, N.S. and C.P., 1994. CORINE land cover: technical guide. European
Commission, Directorate-General, Environment, Nuclear Safety and Civil Protection,
Luxembourg.
Jarvis, A., Reuter, H.I., Nelson, A., Guevara, E., 2008. Hole-filled seamless SRTM data V4.
Manfr, L.A., Hirata, E., Silva, J.B., Shinohara, E.J., Giannotti, M.A., Larocca, A.P.C.,
Quintanilha, J.A., 2012. An analysis of geospatial technologies for risk and natural
disaster management. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information 1, 166185.
McDougall, K., Temple-Watts, P., 2012. The use of LiDAR and volunteered geographic
information to map flood extents and inundation. ISPRS Annals of the
Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences 1, 251256.
Mooney, P., Corcoran, P., 2011. Can Volunteered Geographic Information Be a Participant in
eEnvironment and SDI?, in: Environmental Software Systems. Frameworks of
eEnvironment. Springer, pp. 115122.
Mooney, P., Corcoran, P., Winstanley, A.C., 2010. A study of data representation of natural
features in openstreetmap, in: Proceedings of GIScience. p. 150.
Neis, P., Zielstra, D., Zipf, A., 2011. The street network evolution of crowdsourced maps:
OpenStreetMap in Germany 20072011. Future Internet 4, 121.
Sanders, B.F., 2007. Evaluation of on-line DEMs for flood inundation modeling. Advances in
Water Resources 30, 18311843. doi:10.1016/j.advwatres.2007.02.005
Valeriano, M.M., Kuplich, T.M., Storino, M., Amaral, B.D., Mendes Jr, J.N., Lima, D.J., 2006.
Modeling small watersheds in Brazilian Amazonia with shuttle radar topographic
mission-90m data. Computers & geosciences 32, 11691181.
Wilson, M., Bates, P., Alsdorf, D., Forsberg, B., Horritt, M., Melack, J., Frappart, F.,
Famiglietti, J., 2007. Modeling large-scale inundation of Amazonian seasonally
flooded wetlands. Geophysical Research Letters 34.
Zielstra, D., Zipf, A., 2010. A comparative study of proprietary geodata and volunteered
geographic information for Germany, in: 13th AGILE International Conference on
Geographic Information Science.

16