Freshwater connectivity clusters for lakes, wetlands, and streams at the Hydrologic Unit 12 scale in the Midwest and Northeast U.S.A. – freshwater metric variables and K-means cluster assignment

This dataset includes freshwater connectivity cluster output and
principal component scores for lakes, wetlands, and streams measured
at the Hydrologic Unit 12 (HU12) scale in 17 U.S. states in the
Midwest and Northeast regions (appr. 1,800,000 km2). The intent of the
cluster analysis is to characterize the macroscale patterns of
freshwater connectivity attributes. We define freshwater connectivity
as the permanent surface hydrologic connections that link lakes,
wetlands, and streams and measure connectivity as the landscape
position of systems within stream networks. Geographic data used in
the analysis are in LAGOS-NE-GEO database v. 1.03 (Lake multi-scaled
geospatial and temporal database), an integrated, multi-thematic
geographic database (Soranno et al. 2015). Freshwater connectivity
clusters were created separately for lakes, wetlands, and streams
through a multi-step process as follows: 1) we quantified multiple
freshwater connectivity metrics, 2) we performed principal components
analysis (PCA) on the connectivity metric values for each freshwater
type to reduce collinearity, and 3) we performed k-means cluster
analysis to group spatial units with similar freshwater connectivity
characteristics. The resulting freshwater clusters are representations
of the macroscale patterns of lake, wetland, and stream connectivity
in the landscape.