Airports

Airports of Lao including attributes (name, type, ICAO and IATA code).

Aqueduct Atlas – Access to Water

Access to water measures the percentage of population without access to improved drinking-water sources. Higher values indicate areas where people have less access to safe drinking water, and consequently higher reputational risks to those not using water in an equitable way.

Aqueduct Atlas – Available Blue Water

Available blue water (Ba) is the total amount of water available to a catchment before any uses are satisfied. It is calculated as all water flowing into the catchment from upstream catchments minus upstream consumptive use plus runoff in the catchment.

Aqueduct Atlas – Baseline Water Stress

Baseline water stress measures total annual water withdrawals (municipal, industrial, and agricultural) expressed as a percent of the total annual available flow. Higher values indicate more competition among users.

Aqueduct Atlas – Consumptive Use

Consumptive use is the portion of all water withdrawn that is consumed through evaporation, incorporation into a product, or pollution, such that it is no longer available for reuse. Non-consumptive use is the remainder of withdrawals that is not consumed and instead returns to ground or surface water bodies.

Aqueduct Atlas – Flood Occurrence

Flood Occurrence is the number of floods recorded from 1985 to 2011.

Aqueduct Atlas – Total Blue Water

Total blue water (Bt) for each catchment is the accumulated runoff upstream of the catchment plus the runoff in the catchment.

Aqueduct Atlas – Upstream Protected Lands

Upstream protected land measures the percentage of total water supply that originates from protected ecosystems. Modified land use can affect the health of freshwater ecosystems and have severe downstream impacts on both water quality and quantity.

Aqueduct Atlas – Withdrawal Rates

Total withdrawal is the total amount of water removed from freshwater sources for human use.

Dominant Soil Types

Polygons of dominant soil types of Laos according to FAO classifications.

Freshwater Ecoregions

Freshwater species and habitats are, on average around the world, more imperiled than their terrestrial counterparts. Yet, large-scale conservation planning efforts have rarely targeted freshwater biodiversity. This inattention is due in part to the fact that, compared to better-studied terrestrial taxa, there has been a severe lack of comprehensive, synthesized data on the distributions of freshwater species. Existing worldwide species-level data have covered only the largest river basins or select hotspots, rather than all inland waters. Additionally, these data syntheses have made little attempt to describe biogeographic patterns.

Lower Oder Valley National Park, Brandenburg, Germany. (c) WWF-Canon / Chris Martin

Freshwater Ecoregions of the World (FEOW) is a collaborative project providing the first global biogeographic regionalization of the Earth's freshwater biodiversity, and synthesizing biodiversity and threat data for the resulting ecoregions. We define a freshwater ecoregion as a large area encompassing one or more freshwater systems that contains a distinct assemblage of natural freshwater communities and species. The freshwater species, dynamics, and environmental conditions within a given ecoregion are more similar to each other than to those of surrounding ecoregions and together form a conservation unit.

The freshwater ecoregion map serves as a complement to the global terrestrial and marine ecoregion maps and differs from them in that freshwater species (primarily fish) and freshwater processes drove the map delineation. A detailed description of the delineation methodology is available in Abell et al. (2008).

Hydro-Basins (Level 3)

Hydro-basins provide hydrographic data layers that allow for the derivation of watershed boundaries for any given location based on the near-global, high-resolution SRTM digital elevation model.

Watersheds were delineated in a consistent manner at different scales, and a hierarchical sub-basin breakdown was created following the topological concept of the Pfafstetter coding system (Verdin & Verdin 1999). The resulting polygon layers are termed HydroBASINS and represent a subset of the HydroSHEDS database.

There are 12 levels. Level 3 represent major river systems from headwaters to coast.

Laos economic corridors

Transboundary roads declared Greater Mekong Subregion transport corridors (existing, planned, potential).

Laos Hydropower dam projects (2014)

A subset of data containing known operational and planned hydropower dams in the Greater Mekong Subregion, for Laos, compiled by International Rivers and published in June 2014. Dams data are compiled from various sources, including: the Global Reservoir and Dam (GRanD) Database, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) Challenge Program on Water and Food - Mekong (for Mekong Basin dams only), the United States National Inventory of Dams (NID), other government dam inventories, and original data collection by International Rivers.

Laos protected areas and heritage sites

The World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA) is the most comprehensive global spatial dataset on marine and terrestrial protected areas available. Protected areas are internationally recognised as a critical means of conserving species and ecosystems. Up to date information on protected areas is essential to enable a wide range of conservation and development activities. Since 1981 UNEP-WCMC, through its Protected Areas Programme, has been compiling this information and making it available to the global community. The WDPA is a joint project of UNEP and IUCN, produced by UNEP-WCMC and the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas working with governments and collaborating NGOs.

Main Tourist Sites

Locations of major tourism sites of Laos. Attributes include; site name, country, type of asset UNSECO WHS.

Major Urban areas

This dataset is derived from World Urban Areas and represents the major urban areas (polygons), with populations greater than 10,000 for Laos.

Railways

Vector line data for existing, under construction, planned / potential railway lines in Laos.

Reservoirs

This point layer (GRanD_Reservoirs_v1_1) represents the locations and attribute information of reservoirs contained in the GRanD database, version 1.1. For details please refer to the Technical Documentation.

The Global Reservoir and Dam (GRanD) database contains the world's largest dams and their associated reservoirs. The database consists of two shapefiles: a point (dam) and a polygon (reservoir) layer. For details please refer to the Technical Documentation which accompanies the data.

Rivers

River systems in the Greater Mekong Subregion. Attributes include: name of river, name of basin, name of sub-basin, Strahler number.

Special Economic Zones and Cross Border Economic Zones

SEZ and CBEZ including attributes (name, type, country and code).

Terrestrial Ecoregions

Terrestrial Ecoregions of the World (TEOW) is a biogeographic regionalization of the Earth's terrestrial biodiversity. Our biogeographic units are ecoregions, which are defined as relatively large units of land or water containing a distinct assemblage of natural communities sharing a large majority of species, dynamics, and environmental conditions. There are 867 terrestrial ecoregions, classified into 14 different biomes such as forests, grasslands, or deserts. Ecoregions represent the original distribution of distinct assemblages of species and communities. There are multiple uses for TEOW in our efforts to conserve biodiversity around the world.