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Title: PeRL: a circum-Arctic Permafrost Region Pond and Lake database

Journal Article · · Earth System Science Data (Online)
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  1. Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Potsdam (Germany)
  2. Heidelberg Univ., Heidelberg (Germany)
  3. Humboldt Univ., Berlin (Germany)
  4. Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg (Germany)
  5. Zentralanstalt fur Meteorologie and Geodynamik, Vienna (Austria)
  6. U. S. Geological Survey, Anchorage, AK (United States)
  7. Stockholm Univ., Stockholm (Sweden)
  8. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
  9. Russian Academy of Sciences, Pushchino (Russia)
  10. Univ. of Alaska, Fairbanks, AK (United States)
  11. Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS), Quebec, QC (Canada); Univ. of Montreal, Montreal, QC (Canada)
  12. Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL (United States)
  13. Univ. of Montreal, Montreal, QC (Canada)
  14. Univ. of Helsinki, Helsinki (Finland)
  15. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
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Ponds and lakes are abundant in Arctic permafrost lowlands. They play an important role in Arctic wetland ecosystems by regulating carbon, water, and energy fluxes and providing freshwater habitats. However, ponds, i.e., waterbodies with surface areas smaller than 1.0 × 104 m2, have not been inventoried on global and regional scales. The Permafrost Region Pond and Lake (PeRL) database presents the results of a circum-Arctic effort to map ponds and lakes from modern (2002–2013) high-resolution aerial and satellite imagery with a resolution of 5 m or better. The database also includes historical imagery from 1948 to 1965 with a resolution of 6 m or better. PeRL includes 69 maps covering a wide range of environmental conditions from tundra to boreal regions and from continuous to discontinuous permafrost zones. Waterbody maps are linked to regional permafrost landscape maps which provide information on permafrost extent, ground ice volume, geology, and lithology. This paper describes waterbody classification and accuracy, and presents statistics of waterbody distribution for each site. Maps of permafrost landscapes in Alaska, Canada, and Russia are used to extrapolate waterbody statistics from the site level to regional landscape units. PeRL presents pond and lake estimates for a total area of 1.4 × 106 km2 across the Arctic, about 17 % of the Arctic lowland ( < 300 m a.s.l.) land surface area. PeRL waterbodies with sizes of 1.0 ×106 m2 down to 1.0 ×102 m2 contributed up to 21 % to the total water fraction. Waterbody density ranged from 1.0 ×10 to 9.4 × 101 km–2. Ponds are the dominant waterbody type by number in all landscapes representing 45–99 % of the total waterbody number. In conclusion, the implementation of PeRL size distributions in land surface models will greatly improve the investigation and projection of surface inundation and carbon fluxes in permafrost lowlands.

Research Organization:
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States); Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC52-06NA25396; AC02-05CH11231
OSTI ID:
1375169
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 1379885
Report Number(s):
LA-UR-16-29112
Journal Information:
Earth System Science Data (Online), Vol. 9, Issue 1; ISSN 1866-3516
Publisher:
CopernicusCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 56 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Cited By (16)

Increasing dominance of terrigenous organic matter in circumpolar freshwaters due to permafrost thaw: Increasing allochthony in arctic freshwaters journal February 2018
Constraining dissolved organic matter sources and temporal variability in a model sub-Arctic lake journal November 2019
Lake-Atmosphere Heat Flux Dynamics of a Thermokarst Lake in Arctic Siberia journal May 2018
Space‐Based Observations for Understanding Changes in the Arctic‐Boreal Zone journal January 2020
Minor contribution of small thaw ponds to the pools of carbon and methane in the inland waters of the permafrost-affected part of the Western Siberian Lowland journal March 2018
Toward understanding the contribution of waterbodies to the methane emissions of a permafrost landscape on a regional scale-A case study from the Mackenzie Delta, Canada journal May 2018
Terrestrial CDOM in Lakes of Yamal Peninsula: Connection to Lake and Lake Catchment Properties journal January 2018
Identification of a Threshold Minimum Area for Reflectance Retrieval from Thermokarst Lakes and Ponds Using Full-Pixel Data from Sentinel-2 journal March 2019
A High-Resolution Airborne Color-Infrared Camera Water Mask for the NASA ABoVE Campaign journal September 2019
Landsat-Based Trend Analysis of Lake Dynamics across Northern Permafrost Regions journal June 2017
Ground subsidence effects on simulating dynamic high-latitude surface inundation under permafrost thaw using CLM5 journal January 2019
Potential shifts in zooplankton community structure in response to changing ice regimes and hydrologic connectivity text January 2019
Potential shifts in zooplankton community structure in response to changing ice regimes and hydrologic connectivity text January 2019
Ground subsidence effects on simulating dynamic high-latitude surface inundation under permafrost thaw using CLM5 text January 2019
Potential shifts in zooplankton community structure in response to changing ice regimes and hydrologic connectivity journal January 2019
The role of lake size and local phenomena for monitoring ground-fast lake ice journal September 2018

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