For over several thousand years, the sediment rich annual flood pulse traveling down the Tigris and Euphrates rivers have sustained the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia that we know today as home of the earliest human civilization (Breasted, 1916). This is where the world's first irrigated agricultural system was developed. It was perhaps in Mesopotamia that humans began living in organized settlements as they mastered the ability to grow enough food to reduce dependence on hunting and gathering.

We studied variations in the volume of water stored in small lakes and wetlands using satellite remote sensing and lake water height data contributed by citizen scientists. A total of 94 water bodies across the globe were studied using satellite data in the optical and microwave wavelengths from Landsat 8, Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2. The uncertainty in volume estimation as a function of geography and geophysical factors such as cloud cover, precipitation and water surface temperature, was studied. The key finding that emerged from this global study is that uncertainty is highest in regions with a distinct precipitation season such as in the monsoon dominated South Asia or the Pacific Northwestern region of the US. This uncertainty is further compounded when small lakes and wetlands are seasonal with alternating land use as a water body and agricultural land, such as the wetlands of Northeastern Bangladesh. On an average, 45% of studied lakes could be estimated of