Premium
Lake shoreline in the contiguous United States: quantity, distribution and sensitivity to observation resolution
Author(s) -
Winslow Luke A.,
Read Jordan S.,
Hanson Paul C.,
Stanley Emily H.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
freshwater biology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.297
H-Index - 156
eISSN - 1365-2427
pISSN - 0046-5070
DOI - 10.1111/fwb.12258
Subject(s) - biogeochemical cycle , lake ecosystem , perimeter , shore , physical geography , scale (ratio) , environmental science , hydrology (agriculture) , ecosystem , geology , geography , ecology , cartography , oceanography , biology , geometry , mathematics , geotechnical engineering
Summary Quantifying lake biogeochemical processing at broad spatial scales requires that we scale processes along with physical metrics. Past work has primarily scaled lentic processes using estimates of lake surface area. However, many processes important to lakes, such as material, energy and biological fluxes and biogeochemical cycling, scale with lake perimeter. We estimate the total lake perimeter for the contiguous United States (U.S.) and examine the sensitivity of this estimate to measurement resolution. At the original mapping resolution, lakes in the contiguous U.S. have a total perimeter of over 1.8 million km. The change in measured perimeter versus measurement resolution for the contiguous U.S. had a log‐log slope (also known as the fractal dimension) of −0.21, generally less than previously reported estimates. With changing observation resolution, total measured perimeter was most sensitive to the inclusion or exclusion of small lakes, not shoreline complexity. The total aquatic–terrestrial interface in lakes is less than one‐tenth that of streams and rivers, which collectively account for over 21 million km of shoreline in the contiguous U.S. This study further describes the distribution of lake perimeter and proposes a technique that can contribute to understanding continental‐scale processes.