Abstract: Climate and biodiversity changes affect the environment, and they are also the consequences of environmental change. The HydroSHEDS dataset is a multi-source of global natural-human dataset that is based on basic hydrological information from basins, which forms a nested basin dataset with 12 levels. This dataset provides valuable support for studying how environmental characteristics of basins impact climate change and species distribution. The study investigates the content and application examples of the dataset, and then summarizes the research significance of the HydroSHEDS dataset for climate changes and biodiversity evolution in modern and Quaternary. The results indicate that: (1) HydroSHEDS v1 contains basic global basin information, including flow directions, flow accumulation, and river networks. It incorporates 6 categories (hydrology, physiography, climate, soil & geology, land cover & use, and anthropogenic influences) which comprise 56 variables, a total of 281 attributes on a global scale. (2) By utilizing the fundamental or core data of HydroSHEDS, modern and deep-time climate change research can be conducted, including investigating the impacts of climate changes on other components of the surface system by model simulating, calculating the relationship between basin attribute characteristics and the changes of greenhouse gas concentrations, and the quantitative assessment of proxy data to improve the reconstruction of precipitation and evaporation within the climate model. (3) By directly overlaying or integrated weighting analysis, the environmental attributes of HydroSHEDS dataset could analyze the impacts on species habitats or actual ranges, and simulate their potential distributions in the present and future. (4) Although HydroSHEDS can be used as a prerequisite for the analysis and application of surface systems, the timeliness and sequence of the environmental attribute information recorded by this dataset are not emphasized, rendering this dataset as suitable auxiliary data in time series research. Enriching the time series data of HydroSHEDS is expected to provide valuable support for predicting future climate change and biodiversity evolution and deep-time research.

Key words: HydroSHEDS, HydroATLAS, basin, climatic change, biodiversity, global dataset