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

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 × 10 6 km 2 (1.8% of global land area), a total shoreline length of 7.2 × 10 6 km (about four times longer than the world’s ocean coastline) and a total volume of 181.9 × 10 3 km 3 (0.8% of total global non-frozen terrestrial water stocks). We also compute mean and median hydraulic residence times for all lakes to be 1,834 days and 456 days, respectively. Lakes play a key role in our ecosystems and thus it is vital to understand their distribution and volume. Here, the authors present a new global lake database (HydroLAKES) and develop a new geo-statistical model to show global lake area, shoreline length, water volume and hydraulic residence times.