Name: Global lake distribution of HydroLAKES_McGill University
Display Field: lake_name
Type: Feature Layer
Geometry Type: esriGeometryPolygon
Description: <DIV STYLE="text-align:Left;"><DIV><DIV><P STYLE="text-align:Justify;"><SPAN>The HydroLAKES database was designed as a digital map repository to include all lakes with a surface area of at least 10 ha (Fig. 1). The current version comprises the shoreline polygons of 1,427,688 individual lakes. HydroLAKES aims to be as comprehensive and consistent as possible at a global scale and contains both freshwater and saline lakes, including the Caspian Sea, as well as human-made reservoirs and regulated lakes. </SPAN></P><P STYLE="text-align:Justify;"><SPAN>The HydroLAKES database was created by compiling, correcting, and unifying several near-global and regional datasets (see Methods), foremost the SRTM Water Body Data (SWBD; Slater et al., 2006) for regions from 56˚S to 60˚N, and CanVec (Natural Resources Canada, 2013) for most North American lakes. Map generalization methods were applied and some polygon outlines were smoothed during the mapping process to ensure </SPAN><SPAN>the </SPAN><SPAN>spatial consistency of the data. The resulting map scale is estimated to be between 1:100,000 and 1:250,000 for most lakes globally, with some coarser ones at 1:1 million. </SPAN></P><P STYLE="text-align:Justify;"><SPAN>To enhance the attribute information provided by HydroLAKES, a spatial co-registration to the global river network database HydroSHEDS (Lehner et al., 2008) was established. Literature estimates of lake depths and/or volumes were compiled for all lakes ≥ 500 km2. To predict average lake depths and volumes for smaller lakes, a geostatistical model based on surrounding land surface topography was developed (Messager et al. 2016). The addition of high-resolution discharge data allowed the estimation of hydraulic residence times for each lake. All natural lakes of the HydroLAKES database show a combined surface area of 2.67 x 106 km2 (1.8% of global land area), a total shoreline length of 7.2 x 106 km (about four times longer than the world’s ocean coastline), and a total volume of 181.9 x 103 km3 (0.8% of total global </SPAN><SPAN>non-frozen</SPAN><SPAN> terrestrial water stocks). Mean and median hydraulic residence times for all lakes were computed to be 1834 days and 451 days, respectively.</SPAN></P></DIV></DIV></DIV>
Service Item Id: e3e237f9845347199dd9cefc43eab12a
Copyright Text: The HydroLAKES database has been developed as a team effort in the Global HydroLAB (http://wp.geog.mcgill.ca/hydrolab/), supervised and coordinated by B. Lehner. Many students provided major input to the database, including G. Grill, I. Nedeva, and O. Schmitt. The work was supported by funding provided by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) as part of the Canadian Network for Aquatic Ecosystem Services CNAES and through two NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Awards; and by McGill University, Montreal, Canada. We wish to thank the data-contributing organizations and scholars that provided their individual databases for use in the dataset development and/or incorporation in HydroLAKES. In addition, we thank the many colleagues and individuals who have dedicated time and energy to the study of lakes and contributed in various ways to this research.