The European Environmental Agency has a dataset of rivers in Europe (ECRINS). I made a map.

Inspiration

This map was inspired by Nelson Minar's similar map of the American river map (see image here and source code here). One often sees cool visualizations of geo stuff for the USA, and I wanted to see something for Europe.

Data Source

The raw data is from the European catchments and Rivers network system (Ecrins).

I downloaded the "Rivers" spatialite file, which gives you a EcrRiv_sqlite.zip file. The c_tr table is the table with the river geometry, and the STRAHLER number. It's a very messy and not very clean data files.

The coastlines are from OpenStreetMap. You can read how to use the OSM coastlines in TileMill here.

Styling

I use TileMill (from MapBox) to style and generate the map. The style file for Tilemill is available. The Strahler number (which roughly measures how "downstream" a segment is), controlls how wide the river segement is drawn.

The map projection is EPSG:3035, which is an equal area projection, and it seems to be used by the EEA.

Copyright

• This map (and the style file) is © 2013 Amanda McCann, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA 3.0) licence.
• The raw data is from the European Environment Agency (EEA), and follow their copyright licence.
• The coastline data is from the OpenStreetMap project, and is © OpenStreetMap contributors, and that data is available under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL).

Rivers of Europe by Amanda McCann is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.