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

Abstract

Abstract. 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 × 10 4 m 2 , 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)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(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 Published by Copernicus Publications. S. Muster et al.: A circum-Arctic PeRL1.4 × 10 6 km 2 across the Arctic, about 17 % of the Arctic lowland (< 300 m a.s.l.) land surface area. PeRL waterbodies with sizes of 1.0 × 10 6 m 2 down to 1.0 × 10 2 m 2 contributed up to 21 % to the total water fraction. Waterbody density ranged from 1.0 × 10 to 9.4 × 10 1 km −2 . Ponds are the dominant waterbody type by number in all landscapes representing 45-99 % of the total waterbody number. 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. Waterbody maps, study area boundaries, and maps of regional permafrost landscapes including detailed metadata are available at https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.868349.

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

“…For both study areas the mean waterbody areas belong in the larger half of the 30 study sites that were mapped at high spatial resolution for the permafrost waterbody database developed by Muster et al. () and that are distributed across the Arctic. However, both study areas themselves and in comparison are characterized by the spatial heterogeneity of waterbody distribution described above.…”

“…The waterbodies in both study areas are included in a high resolution permafrost waterbody database by Muster et al. (). In the study area “North”, which is located north of the treeline in the outer delta, 17% of the area are covered with waterbodies.…”

“…For this study we used two waterbody maps from the circum‐arctic database PeRL (Permafrost Region Pond and Lake) (Muster et al., ) (mdn00120100716 as our northern study area; mdw00120090921 as our southern study area). Both maps were produced based on TerraSAR‐X data (Muster et al., ; North: data acquired at 16 July 2010; South: data acquired at 21 September 2009) and have a spatial resolution of 2.5 m. The data processing was done for both study areas in ESRI ArcMAP v10.4 and the data were projected to NAD83 UTM 8N. The CH 4 flux map and the waterbody maps were clipped to the mutual extent, leaving an area of 965 km² for the northern study area and 873 km² for the southern study area.…”

“…Lastly, we compared the CH 4 emissions from our study areas, which are integrated across land‐cover classes, to literature‐reported fluxes from northern ecosystems by scaling the latter to the extent of our study areas. We based the scaling on the PeRL waterbody maps (Muster et al., ) and on the waterbody classes and corresponding CH 4 fluxes reported in a review study by Wik, Varner, et al. ().…”

Terrestrial CDOM in Lakes of Yamal Peninsula: Connection to Lake and Lake Catchment Properties

“…In the Arctic, this is critical, since many lakes and ponds are relatively small in size but are very important for the carbon cycle [79,80]. However, a major challenge for deriving CDOM and DOC in lakes from optical remote sensing is the need for concomitant in-situ data and the requirement of high-quality satellite surface reflectance data for retrieval of CDOM [40,41,81,82].…”