LAGOS-NE v.1.054.1 Lake water clarity time series (1987-2011), climate, and geophysical data for 601 lakes across a 17-state region of the United States

Time series of median summer water clarity (secchi) values from 601 unique lakes in the Midwest and Northeast United States. Water clarity observations were derived from the Lake Multi-Scaled Geospatial and Temporal Database LAGOS-NELIMNO version 1.054.1. These data were used to assess long-term changes in water clarity from 1987-2011, and the potential drivers of those trends (Lottig et al. in press). Summer open water period was used to approximate the stratified period in the study lakes, which was defined as June 15 to September 15. Over the 25-year time period, each lake had to have at least a single summer water clarity observation for 22 of 25 years. The median number of secchi measurements that were used to derive a single annual median value for each lake was approximately 9. Of the over 14,000 annual estimates of water clarity that we generated, only two percent of those annual values were generated from a single observation and median number of observations for each lake over the 25-year study period was 223. Each unique lake with water clarity data also has supporting geophysical data, including climate, land use, hydrology, and topography derived at multiple spatial scales. Lake-specific characteristics, such as depth and area, are also reported. The geospatial data came from LAGOS-NEGEO version 1.03 except for the annual climate data which was aggregated at the HUC8 spatial scale from monthly PRISM data. For more specific information on how LAGOS-NE was created, see Soranno et al. 2015. Citations: Lottig, N.R., P-N. Tan, T. Wager, K.S. Cheruvelil, P.A. Soranno, E.H. Stanley, C.E Scott, C.A. Stow, and S. Yuan. in press. Macroscale patterns of synchrony identify complex relationships among spatial and temporal ecosystem drivers. Ecosphere Soranno P.A., Bissell E.G., Cheruvelil K.S., Christel S.T., Collins S.M., Fergus C.E., Filstrup C.T., Lapierre J.-F., Lottig N.R., Oliver S.K., Scott C.E., Smith N.J., Stopyak S., Yuan S., Bremigan M.T., Downing J.A., Gries C., Henry E.N., Skaff N.K., Stanley E.H., Stow C.A., Tan P.-N., Wagner T., and Webster K.E. 2015. Building a multi-scaled geospatial temporal ecology database from disparate data sources: fostering open science and data reuse. Gigascience 4: 28. doi: 10.1186/s13742-015-0067-4.