The River Wild: Towards a Global Assessment of Wild Rivers

This article looks at the global distribution of wild rivers using GIS-based approaches with the aim of developing and exploring more unified approaches to wild river identification and appraisal. There are several published versions of a global wilderness map but no integrated global map of the distribution of wild rivers. Global hydrological datasets are integrated here with global wilderness maps to identify the top 10% wildest rivers at both global and continental scales. The discussion and conclusions cover the dangers of overreliance on global datasets and the need for multiscale analyses incorporating finer scale datasets and local knowledge.