LAGOS-NE v.1.054.1 - Lake water quality time series and geophysical data from a 17-state region of the United States

Time series of mean summer total nitrogen (TN), total phosphorus (TP),
stoichiometry (TN:TP) and chlorophyll values from 2913 unique lakes in
the Midwest and Northeast United States. Epilimnetic nutrient and
chlorophyll observations were derived from the Lake Multi-Scaled
Geospatial and Temporal Database LAGOS-NE LIMNO version 1.054.1, and come from 54 disparate data sources. These data
were used to assess long-term monotonic changes in water quality from
1990-2013, and the potential drivers of those trends (Oliver et al.,
submitted). Summer was used to approximate the stratified period,
which was defined as June 15 to September 15. The median number of
observations per summer for a given lake was 2, but ranged from 1 to
83. The rules for inclusion in the database were that, for a given
water quality parameter, a lake must have an observation in each
period of 1990-2000 and 2001-2011. Additionally, observations must
span at least 5 years. Each unique lake with nutrient or chlorophyll
data also has supporting geophysical data, including climate,
atmospheric deposition, land use, hydrology, and topography derived at
the lake watershed (variable prefix “iws”) and HUC 4 (variable prefix
“hu4”) scale. Lake-specific characteristics, such as depth and area,
are also reported. The geospatial data came from
LAGOS-NE GEO version 1.03. For more specific
information on how LAGOS-NE was created, see Soranno et al. 2015. 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.