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To manage water resources and forecast river flows, hydrologists seek to understand how water moves from precipitation, through watersheds, into river channels. However, we lack fundamental information on the spatial distribution and physical controls on global hydrologic processes. This information is needed to provide theoretical support for large-domain model simulations. Here, to address this issue, we present a global, searchable database of 400 research watersheds with published descriptions of dominant hydrologic flow pathways. This knowledge synthesis approach leverages decades of grant funding, fieldwork effort and local expertise. We use the database to test longstanding hypotheses about the roles of climate, biomes and landforms in controlling hydrologic processes. We show that aridity predicts the depth of water flow pathways and that terrain and biomes predict the prevalence of lateral flow pathways. These new data and search capabilities support efficient hypothesis testing to investigate emergent patterns that relate landscape organization to hydrologic function.