Analysis of Pond and Lake Quantifies Size-Class Distribution of Water Bodies in High-Latitude Ecosystems

Analysis of Pond and Lake Quantifies Size-Class Distribution of Water Bodies in High-Latitude Ecosystems

September 1st, 2017
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The Objective: 

Quantify spatial heterogeneity of lakes and ponds provides a resource that can be used to benchmark land surface models.

New Science: 
  • Small waterbodies (<10 ha) represent a large fraction of Arctic landscapes and regulate CO2 and CH4 fluxes.
  • Application of size class distributions in land surface models (i.e., ALM) will improve projections of surface inundation and carbon fluxes in permafrost lowlands.
The Impact: 
  • Time-series analysis of data sets from 1948 to 2013 and from a variety of airborne and satellite imagery.
  • High-resolution maps and classification scheme for lakes and ponds covering a wide range of landscapes from tundra to boreal regions and from continuous to discontinuous permafrost zones.

Lakes and ponds of variable size and distribution influence physical and biogeochemical processes.

Funding: 

This research was supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research of the US Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231 as part of the Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments (NGEE Arctic) project.

Contacts: 

NGEE Arctic