ESRI Shapefile Support

RiverTools can import ESRI shapefiles with points, lines, or polygons and display them as vector layers in a multi-layer plot and can also display their attribute table. It can export shapefiles of basin boundaries with 3 attributes as well as river networks with up to 20 user-selected attributes for use by other applications. This is especially useful since RiverTools computes areas, slopes and lengths more accurately than other software by integrating these values over the surface of a user-selected ellipsoid model in the case of Geographic elevation data.

Unlike many other formats, shapefiles are a nonproprietary and documented format for sharing vector data between GIS (Geographic Information System) applications. DLGs (Digital Line Graphs) in the modern SDTS format (Topological Vector Profile) are another common vector data format that can be imported and displayed by RiverTools.

The ".bil" and ".flt" formats (nonproprietary) for raster data (or grids) can also be imported, displayed and exported by RiverTools. This further simplifies data sharing with ESRI GIS products.