The inventory of dams in Germany contains information on name, date of construction, the start of operation, state, river, dam height, crest length, lake area, lake volume, purpose of the dam, dam type, building characteristics, and coordinates. The inventory is a zip-file composed of 3 tab-delimited files and 1 shapefile. The shapefile contains all 530 dams with all 15 columns and can be opened with every GIS program. The geographic coordinate system used is WGS 1984.

The file 2020-005_Speckhann-et-al_Dams_in_Germany_v.1.0.txt has the same information as the shapefile, i.e. contains 530 dams with the same 15 columns and it is delimitated using tab. The 2020-005_Speckhann-et-al_Abreviation.txt file contains 4 different tables which presents every abbreviation used at the inventory. The abbreviations were used for several applications: dam building characteristics, purpose of the dams, German states, and dam’s type. They were separated in 4 different tables (Building characteristics, Purpose, States and Type). The Building Characteristics are related to the structural formation of the dams, for example embankment dam is listed as “EDD”. All abbreviations regarding the building characteristics of the dam can be visualized at Table 2 at the Data description. The Purpose of the dams was divided into 8 categories: energy production, flood control, recreational use, water supply, industrial and agricultural water supply, fishing, transport and nature protection. At the inventory there are multi-purposes dams and single-purposes dams, i.e. a dam might have more than one purpose. The States in Germany were also abbreviated at the inventory using 2 letters. Due to no observed entries at the inventory for Berlin, Bremen and Hamburg, those states are not shown at Table 4. The types of dams were also abbreviated. 2020-005_Speckhann-et-al_Source_v.1.0.txt contains the name of every dam and the main source used for the obtention of the information.
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