A dataset of lake-catchment characteristics for the Tibetan Plateau

Abstract

Abstract. The management and conservation of lakes should be conducted in the context of catchment because lakes collect water and materials from their upstream catchments. So the datasets of catchment-level characteristics are essential for limnology studies. Lakes are widely spread on the Tibetan Plateau (TP) with a total lake area exceeding 50 000 km2, accounting for more than half of the total lake area in China. However, there has been no dataset of lake-catchment characteristics in this region to date. This study constructed the first dataset of lake-catchment characteristics for 1525 lakes with area from 0.2 to 4503 km2 on the TP. Considering that large lakes block the transport of materials from upstream to downstream, lake catchments are delineated in two ways: the full catchment, which refers to the full upstream contributing area of each lake, and the inter-lake catchments which are obtained by excluding the contributing areas of upstream lakes larger than 0.2 km2 from the full catchment. There are six categories (i.e. lake body, topographic, climatic, land cover/use, soil & geology, and anthropogenic activity) and a total of 721 attributes in the dataset. Besides multi-year average attributes, the daily time series of climatic variables are also extracted, which can be used to drive lumped hydrological models or machine learning models for hydrological simulation. The LCC-TP dataset contains fundamental information for analysing the impact of catchment-level characteristics on lake properties, which on the one hand can deepen our understanding on the drivers of lake environment change, and on the other hand, can be used to predict the water and sediment properties in unsampled lakes based on limited samples. This provides exciting opportunities for lake studies in a spatially-explicit context and promotes the development of landscape limnology on the TP. The dataset of lake-catchment characteristics for the Tibetan Plateau (LCC-TP v1.0) is accessible at the National Tibetan Plateau/Third Pole Environment Data Center (https://doi.org/10.11888/Terre.tpdc.272026, Liu, 2022).

Sedimentary ancient DNA reveals past ecosystem and biodiversity changes on the Tibetan Plateau: Overview and prospects

“…In addition, DNA from taxa growing along the rivers and lakeshores may have a good chance of being transported into the lake, as exemplified by the overrepresentation of Salix and Populus DNA in lake surface sediments from the Tibetan Plateau and arid northwestern China (Jia, 2020;. With diverse landscapes and well-developed hydrographical networks in the catchments (Liu et al, 2022), most large lakes on the Tibetan Plateau are expected to have more upstream inputs compared with small lakes (or ponds) in the Arctic region that only receive inflow from limited streams (e.g., Alsos et al, 2018;Niemeyer et al, 2017). This means that their sedaDNA records not only give a local signal, but also have the potential to provide comprehensive information on species assemblages at the catchment scale (Clarke et al, 2018;Giguet-Covex et al, 2019).…”

“…Based on the current knowledge of taphonomy and our research experiences, we conclude that sedaDNA studies could preferentially select deep lakes characterized by ideal hydrochemical conditions (intermediate electrical conductivities and neutral to slightly alkaline pH), clay mineral-rich and fine sediments, and medium-sized catchments with well-developed hydrographical networks, high erosion rates, and diverse ecosystems. From this perspective, some deep glacial lakes with freshwater (Jia et al, 2022;Liu et al, 2022) and high clay sediment input (Wang et al, 2012), such as those from the southern and southeastern Tibetan Plateau, may have a high potential for sedaDNA studies in the future. Aside from lakes, systematic taphonomic studies of sedaDNA in other archives such as cave sediments (e.g., Haouchar et al, 2014;Massilani et al, 2022) and soils (e.g., Ariza et al, 2022;Edwards et al, 2018) from the Tibetan Plateau are also highly encouraged in the future.…”