Global lake area, climate, and population dataset

An increasing population in conjunction with a changing climate necessitates a detailed
understanding of water abundance at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Remote sensing has
provided massive data volumes to track fluctuations in water quantity, yet contextualizing
water abundance with other local, regional, and global trends remains challenging by often
requiring large computational resources to combine multiple data sources into
analytically-friendly formats. To bridge this gap and facilitate future freshwater research
opportunities, we harmonized existing global datasets to create the Global Lake area,
Climate, and Population (GLCP) dataset. The GLCP is a compilation of lake surface area for
1.42+ million lakes and reservoirs of at least 10 ha in size from 1995 to 2015 with
co-located basin-level temperature, precipitation, and population data. The GLCP was created
with FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) data principles in mind and
retains unique identifiers from parent datasets to expedite interoperability. The GLCP
offers critical data for basic and applied investigations of lake surface area, and water
quantity, at local, regional, and global scales.