EDI Staging Environment
Shallow areas of lakes, known as littoral zones, emit disproportionately more methane than open water but are typically ignored in upscaled estimates of lake greenhouse gas emissions. Littoral zone coverage may be estimated through synthetic aperture radar (SAR) mapping of emergent aquatic vegetation, which only grows in water less than ~1.5 m deep. In an accompanying publication, we combine airborne SAR mapping with field measurements of littoral and open-water methane flux to assess the importance of littoral zones to landscape-scale methane emissions. We account for vegetated littoral zones through a simple upscaling exercise using representative, paired open water and littoral methane fluxes and find that inclusion of littoral zones nearly doubles overall lake methane emissions, with an increase of 79 [68 – 94]% relative to estimates that do not differentiate lake zones. This dataset contains the field measurements of chamber methane flux from vegetated littoral zones and open water used for the accompanying publication. It also includes within-lake locations, carbon dioxide measurements, simple characterizations of vegetation type, and associated limnological and meteorological measurements, when available: water and air temperature, water depth, wind speed and direction, and relative humidity.
EDI is a collaboration between the University of New Mexico and the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Center for Limnology:
