Continental HydroLAKES Subset Shapefiles (Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, Eurasia, Holarctic, Indo-Pacific, North America, South America, New World, Old World)

This dataset provides continental and regional subsets of the HydroLAKES v1.0 global lake polygon database (Lehner & Messager 2016) for use in large-scale environmental and ecological modeling workflows. The original HydroLAKES dataset was obtained from the HydroSHEDS data portal (hydrosheds.org/page/hydrolakes) and includes approximately 1.4 million individual lake polygons (surface area ≥ 10 ha) derived from HydroSHEDS and Hydro1K elevation data. To facilitate faster processing and region-specific analyses, the full global shapefile was spatially partitioned into eleven continental subsets based on predefined geographic extents: Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, Eurasia, Holarctic, Indo-Pacific, North America, South America, New World, and Old World. Each subset was generated using bounding boxes consistent with other continental datasets in this project (for example, Copernicus GLO-90 DEM), ensuring spatial compatibility across environmental variables. All subsets are stored as compressed ESRI Shapefiles (.zip archives) containing the standard .shp, .dbf, .shx, and .prj components. Each file preserves the original HydroLAKES attribute fields (such as LakeID, CenterLat, CenterLong, Lake_area, Depth_avg, Depth_max, etc.) and retains the WGS84 geographic coordinate reference system (EPSG:4326). Users can load the data directly in GIS software (such as QGIS or ArcGIS) or within R using the functions terra::vect() or sf::st_read(). These subsets are particularly suitable for regional filtering of inland water bodies prior to background masking or terrain analysis in species distribution, hydrological, and landscape modeling applications. Source: HydroLAKES v1.0, HydroSHEDS Database — hydrosheds.org/page/hydrolakesCitation: Lehner, B. and Messager, M.L. (2016). HydroLAKES: Global Lakes and Reservoir Database. Environmental Data Initiative.