Lake-TopoCat: a global lake drainage topology and catchment database

Lakes and reservoirs are ubiquitous across global landscapes, functioning as the largest repository of liquid surface freshwater, hotspots of carbon cycling, and sentinels of climate change. Although typically considered lentic (hydrologically stationary) environments, lakes are an integral part of global drainage networks. Through perennial and intermittent hydrological connections, lakes often interact with each other, and these connections actively affect water mass, quality, and energy balances in both lacustrine and fluvial systems. Deciphering how global lakes are hydrologically interconnected (or the so-called lake drainage topology) is not only important for lake change attribution but also increasingly critical for discharge, sediment, and carbon modeling. Despite the proliferation of river hydrography data, lakes remain poorly represented in routing models, partially because there has been no global-scale hydrography dataset tailored to lake drainage basins and networks. Here, we introduce the global Lake drainage Topology and Catchment database (Lake-TopoCat), which reveals detailed lake hydrography information with careful consideration of possible multifurcation. Lake-TopoCat contains the outlet(s) and catchment(s) of each lake; the interconnecting reaches among lakes; and a wide suite of attributes depicting lake drainage topology such as upstream and downstream relationship, drainage distance between lakes, and a priori drainage type and connectivity with river networks. Using the HydroLAKES v1.0 (Messager et al., 2016) global lake mask, Lake-TopoCat identifies similar to 1.46 million outlets for similar to 1.43 million lakes larger than 10 ha and delineates 77.5 x 10(6) km(2) of lake catchments covering 57% of the Earth's landmass except Antarctica. The global lakes are interconnected by similar to 3 million reaches, derived from MERIT Hydro v1.0.1 (Yamazaki et al., 2019), stretching a total distance of similar to 10 x 10(6) km, of which similar to 80% are shorter than 10 km. With such unprecedented lake hydrography details, Lake-TopoCat contributes towards a globally coupled lake-river routing model. It may also facilitate a variety of limnological applications such as attributing water quality from lake scale to basin scale, tracing inter-lake fish migration due to changing climate, monitoring fluvial-lacustrine connectivity, and improving estimates of terrestrial carbon fluxes. Lake-TopoCat is freely accessible at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7916729 (Sikder et al., 2023).

Automated summary

Lakes and reservoirs are important components of global landscapes, serving as crucial repositories of freshwater and playing a significant role in carbon cycling and climate change. Understanding the hydrological connectivity of global lakes is essential for various applications, including lake change attribution and modeling of discharge, sediment, and carbon. The introduction of the global Lake drainage Topology and Catchment database (Lake-TopoCat) provides detailed information on lake hydrography and facilitates the development of a globally coupled lake-river routing model. Lake-TopoCat contributes to a wide range of limnological studies and has the potential to improve our understanding of water quality, fish migration, fluvial-lacustrine connectivity, and terrestrial carbon fluxes.