Validity, applicability and universality of fractal scaling laws for natural lakes

We conducted a systematic investigation on the validity, applicability and universality of the fractal scaling relationships for natural lakes within China. Hydro-climatic zones from the Hydrological regionalization of China were taken as the statistical units for all the analyses. Lake size and hydrological parameters used in the analyses are from the HydroLAKES database. To test the validity of the fractal scaling relationships between lake properties, power law functions were fitted to these properties. To examine the effects of topographical relief on the power law size distribution, regional degree of topographical relief  was calculated for each zone based on ASTER GDEM2. To explore the potential impacts of human activities on the applicability of power law size distribution, Human modification index data was jointly analyzed with the power law distribution of lake size.