The Lake-Catchment (LakeCat) Dataset: characterizing landscape features for lake basins within the conterminous USA.

ABSTRACT: Natural and human-related landscape features influence the ecology and water quality of lakes. Summarizing these features in a hydrologically meaningful way is critical to understanding and managing lake ecosystems. Such summaries are often done by delineating watershed boundaries of individual lakes. However, many technical challenges are associated with delineating hundreds or thousands of lake watersheds at broad spatial extents. These challenges can limit the application of analyses and models to new, unsampled locations. We present the Lake-Catchment (LakeCat) Dataset (https://www.epa.gov/national-aquatic-resource-surveys/lakecat) of watershed features for 378,088 lakes within the conterminous USA. We describe the methods we used to: 1) delineate lake catchments, 2) hydrologically con

SUBMITTER: Hill RA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6020677 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature