LAGOS-NE – Lake nutrient chemistry and geospatial data to measure spatial structure of ecosystem properties in a 17-state region of the U.S.

This dataset includes data for the lake water quality and geospatial variables that
describe climate, hydrology, land use land cover, and lake characteristics that were used to
study spatial structure in lake properties at the sub-continental scales (Lapierre et al.
Quantifying spatial structure to improve understanding of the relationships between climate,
landscape, and lake ecosystem properties, to be submitted to Ecology). All observations came
from LAGOS-NELIMNO v. 1.054.1 and LAGOS-NEGEO v. 1.03 (LAke multi-scaled GeOSpatial and
temporal database), an integrated database of lake ecosystems (Soranno et al. 2015).
LAGOS-NE contains a complete census of lakes great than or equal to 4 ha with corresponding
geospatial information for a 17-state region of the U.S., and a subset of the lakes has
observational data on morphometry and chemistry. Approximately 54 different sources of data
were compiled for the LAGOS-NELIMNO v. 1.054.1 dataset and were mostly generated by
government agencies (state, federal, tribal) and universities. In this analysis, we compiled
lake water quality data from the summer stratified season (June 15-September 15) in the most
recent 10 years of data included in LAGOS-NELIMNO v. 1.054.1 (2002-2011). We report the
median total nitrogen, total phosphorus, secchi depth, and chlorophyll values for each lake,
which was calculated as the grand median of each yearly median value. We also include data
for lake and landscape characteristics including variables related to lake morphometry,
climate, hydrology, atmospheric deposition, land use and land cover.