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This is an open access article under the terms of the Creat ive Commo ns Attri bution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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CO 2 evasion from freshwater lakes is an important component of the carbon cycle. However, the relative contribution from different lake sizes may vary, since several parameters underlying CO 2 flux are size dependent. Here we estimated the annual lake CO 2 evasion from a catchment in northern Sweden encompassing about 30,000 differently sized lakes. We show that areal CO 2 fluxes decreased rapidly with lake size, but this was counteracted by the greater overall coverage of larger lakes. As a result, total efflux increased with lake size and the single largest lake in the catchment dominated the CO 2 evasion (53% of all CO 2 evaded). By contrast, the contribution from the smallest ponds (about 27,000) was minor (<6%). Our results emphasize the importance of accounting for both CO 2 flux rates and areal contribution of various sized lakes in assessments of CO 2 evasion at the landscape scale.