 Abstract rivers form channel belts, which are large areas of the river's course and associated features such as levees, bars, splays and overbank landforms. These channel belts are important in understanding how rivers evolve over time, predicting their behavior and managing freshwater resources. Using a pattern recognition algorithm, it was found that globally, the total surface area of these channel belts is approximately 30.5 million square kilometers, which is about 7 times greater than the size of the river channels themselves. Of this total, 52% of the river channels were found to be multi-threaded while the remaining 48% were single-threaded. This data provides new methods for high-resolution global scale landform classification and can be used to incorporate the channel belt into flood mitigation, freshwater budgeting, ecosystem accounting and biogeochemical analysis. This article was authored by Bjorn Nyberg, Geis Henstra, Rob L. Gorthor and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.