Estimating the volume and age of water stored in global lakes using a geo-statistical approach.

ABSTRACT: Lakes are key components of biogeochemical and ecological processes, thus knowledge about their distribution, volume and residence time is crucial in understanding their properties and interactions within the Earth system. However, global information is scarce and inconsistent across spatial scales and regions. Here we develop a geo-statistical model to estimate the volume of global lakes with a surface area of at least 10 ha based on the surrounding terrain information. Our spatially resolved database shows 1.42 million individual polygons of natural lakes with a total surface area of 2.67 × 10⁶ km² (1.8% of global land area), a total shoreline length of 7.2 × 10⁶ km (about four times longer than the world's ocean coastline) and a total volume of 181.9 × 1

SUBMITTER: Messager ML 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5171767 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature