Clustering Large Lakes and Reservoirs in Europe on the Basis of their Morphometry, Catchment, and Climatic Conditions

Our aim was to analyse the relationships between lake morphometry, catchment characteristics, and climatic parameters in a set of large (>100 km2) lakes and reservoirs in Europe using the GIS platform and databases available in WISE and come up with a preliminary robust typology for these water bodies. Besides the purely scientific interests this analysis served also as a test of the performance of WISE tools and linkages between various data layers. Correlating lake parameters with geographic coordinates revealed the following significant (p < 0.05) relationships: towards east the areas of water bodies and their catchment areas increased and the shoreline became more complex, towards north the retention time became shorter and also the shoreline more complex. With increasing altitude catchments became smaller, the retention times longer, and the lakes deeper. We distinguished five clusters of water bodies on the basis of morphometric and climatic variables. This number yielded a rather robust but still interpretable typology. The conducted typology exercise showed that the data sets presently available in WISE enable easily typologize water bodies based on their morphometry and basin characteristics and the regional climate variables. However, the analysis revealed also several shortcomings and data gaps. First of all, the bathymetric data (mean and maximum depth) need to be completed for all relevant water bodies.

NOGES Peeter;  DE JAGER Alfred; 

2009-07-20

International Association of Theoretical and Applied Limnology

JRC42856