Data Publisher & Repository

Modern river sand, unaffected by diagenesis, with sampling site’s lithological, climatic conditions and tectonic domains are fully known, can provide valuable information on the relationship between sediment compositions and different controlling factors including lithology, climate, tectonic, or other diverse physical and chemical processes during the sediment generation, transport and deposition. With the growing interest in source-to-sink sedimentary systems for economic purposes, researchers have focused more and more on modern environments, producing an ever-increasing amount of compositional data on river sediments. To better integrate and utilise these large datasets, we systematically compiled a global database of 4208 fluvial sediment samples compiled from 100 published papers, book chapters and dissertations, and including 3747 petrographic and 1943 heavy-mineral analyses. The analysed samples are mostly located in Asia, Africa, Europe, and South America, with fewer examples from North America and Oceania. Each sample is complemented by metadata describing references, river name, geographic location, sampling date, analytical method and grain size, so that samples can be grouped and filtered to meet different needs including comparison with other datasets.