Danube River Basin Geographic Information System

Brief Information

Installation
Webapplication

License
Open source software

Payment
free

About Danube River Basin Geographic Information System

The DanubeGIS platform supports the ICPDR in its tasks related to spatial data, and it is now open to public users as well – providing access to data and maps for the whole Danube Basin.

The geographical area covered by the DanubeGIS is the territory of the Danube River Basin District shared by 19 countries, of which 14 are ICPDR Contracting Parties.
The DanubeGIS doesn’t aim to provide the whole range and full detail of all of the datasets that may be available on related systems on national level, as it only covers rivers with a catchment size larger than 4000 km². On the other hand, its unique quality is that it provides combined datasets for the whole Danube Basin, that are relevant for the full range of tasks of the ICPDR such as industrial and urban pollution sources, waste water treatment, continuity interruptions for fish migration, hydrological alterations, and the status assessment of water bodies.

DanubeGIS is a tool for integration and storage of the Contracting Parties’ relevant data resources in a harmonised format, and a common basis for data usage in the ICPDR. The national members of the IMGIS EG coordinate data collection in their countries and provide those datasets to the DanubeGIS. In this context, a jointly accepted data policy has been developed.

The DanubeGIS is built to provide a Danube Basin-wide platform to support the ICPDR in its reporting tasks – such as the implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) and of the EU Floods Directive (FD).

The target groups, which have all benefited from the existence of the DanubeGIS platform, are mainly experts working either directly with the ICPDR or in projects related to water management. This includes the 23 Observers to the ICPDR, research institutions, universities, other stakeholders and the general public.

In the GIS web map viewer one can select any of the over 40 maps prepared within the DRBM Plan and DFRM Plan, zoom into them and find out about the detailed data of each feature on the map by simply clicking on it.
Each map can also be exported as a georeferenced image file or accessed directly as a Web Map Service (WMS) – this allows GIS experts to use the map in any software supporting these standard services.

Users who are interested in more in-depth work with the available data can sign-up for a user account to reveal more expert system features. An advanced web map viewer allows those users to compose maps by combining any individual layers. In addition to Web Map Service , the Web Feature Service (WFS) allows download of the datasets in various formats, including Geography Markup Language (GML – an open interchange format for geographic data) and shape files.

The advanced viewer also enables users to import the geographic data web services from other accessible GIS servers, for example from the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission or other relevant data providers.

Regional Focus