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.