As Earth’s surficial pulse, the world’s rivers beat in response to precipitation and transport water, nutrients, and pollutants downstream or to the atmosphere. Contextualizing surface water resources requires a toolkit of models, algorithms, and data. Despite significant progress, at global scales we often model all rivers the same way: as lumped units with homogenous geomorphology and only implicit representation of their drainage networks, hydraulic geometry, and hydrologic connectivity. This can have cascading effects on our ability to understand, contextualize, and in turn manage surface water quantity and quality across scales. To overcome these challenges, this dissertation advances a place-based ‘hydro-bio-geo-morpho-chemical’ approach to global river science that uniquely characterizes every river at scale. Herein I develop, expand upon, and combine remote sensing algorithms, river transport models, techniques for efficient geoprocessing at scale, synthesis of large field databases, and hydrologic connectivity and hydraulic geometry theories to better understand water and carbon transport through the world’s river systems. Ultimately, this dissertation provides an improved framework for taking the pulse of global rivers to better inform water resources science and management at present and into the future.