The River Network Toolkit - RivTool

Freshwater ecosystems are some of the most endangered environments in the world, being affected at multiple scales by the surrounding landscape and human activities therein. Effective research, conservation and management of these ecosystems requires integrating environmental and landscape data with hierarchic river networks by means of summarisation and synthesis of information for large and comprehensive areas at different scales (e.g. basin, sub-basin, upstream drainage area). The dendritic nature of river networks, the need to tackle multiple scales and the ever-growing sources of digital information (e.g. temperature or land use data grids) have increasingly led to hardly manageable processing time and stringent hardware requirements when integrating and working with this information. Here we present the River Network Toolkit (RivTool), a software that uses only tabular data to derive and calculate new information at multiple scales for riverine landscapes. It uses data from linear hierarchical river networks and the environmental/landscape data from their respective drainage areas. The software allows the acquisition of: 1) information that characterises river networks based on its topographic nature; 2) data obtained via mathematical calculations that account for the hierarchical and network nature of these systems; and 3) output information using different spatial data sources (e.g. climatic, land use, topologic) that result from up and downstream summarisations. This user-friendly software considers two units of analysis (segment and sub-basin) and is time effective even with large datasets. RivTool facilitates and reduces the time required for extracting information for freshwater ecosystems, and may thus contribute to increase scientific productivity, efficiency and accurateness when generating new or improving existing knowledge on large-scale patterns and processes in river networks.