Abstract
Lakes, ponds, and reservoirs (hereafter: “lakes”) are important sources of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4). Emissions of CO2 and CH4 from lakes are regulated in part by in-lake processes, including the production and storage of gases in the lower parts of the water column (bottom waters). However, while substantial efforts have been made to improve estimates of greenhouse gas emissions from lakes, limited data on gas concentrations along depth profiles have prevented the incorporation of bottom-water processes in global emission estimates. Here, we present GHG-depths: the largest existing dataset of depth-profile CO2 and CH4 measurements worldwide, including 522 lakes across 38 countries and all seven continents. These data include contributions from 45 research teams and 56 published studies, totaling 2558 discrete sampling events. As global change continues to alter biogeochemical cycling in lakes, these data can help improve mechanistic models to better predict greenhouse gas production and emission from lakes worldwide.
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Data availability
Data are available in the Environmental Data Initiative repository31, and accessible at https://doi.org/10.6073/pasta/2b72b89bbfbb3da0e198f392a9cbad18.
Code availability
All data compilation and figure generation was conducted using R statistical software132. Code used to generate figures, validate data, and generate the analysis-ready compiled greenhouse gas data file (“Processed GHG data”) is available in an open-source GitHub repository (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17782010).
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Acknowledgements
This work was conceived at the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON) meeting in New York in 2022. Funding and support for this work came from the following sources: the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund as recommended by the Minnesota Aquatic Invasive Species Research Center (MAISRC) and the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR); the Smithsonian Climate Change Fellowship; the U.S. Geological Survey Ecosystems Land Change Science Program and U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research (Grant DE-SC0023084); the Polish Science Foundation grant 2020/39/I/ST10/02129; the Virginia Reservoirs LTREB monitoring program and team, supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation grants DEB-2327030 and EF-2318861; the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program to SLD under Grant #1347973 and #1842493; the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programmes under grant agreement No 869296—The PONDERFUL Project; the Swedish Infrastructure for Ecosystem Science (SITES); the Israel Science Foundation; the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Water Power Technologies Office. ORNL is managed by UT-Battelle, LLC, for the U.S. DOE under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725. R. Trent Jett, Michael Jones, Nikki Jones, Allison Fortner, Jana Phillips, and Chloe Faehndrich supported in field data collection; DFG (The German Research Foundation) “Aquameth” projects, GR1540/21-1 & 21-2 and projects 36207363, 197083521 & 184075001; the Bay of Plenty Regional Council, New Zealand; FORMAS (The Swedish Research Council) grant, numbers 2016–00846, 2020-00950, and 2020-06460, Roger Valdén, Joel Segersten, Patrick M. Crill, and Martin Wik supported in field data collection; the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science; the Research Council of Finland; the Finnish Environment Institute; the FERRO project: 101157743 — HORIZON-MISS-2023-OCEAN-01; the Estonian Research Council, grants (PRG1167, and PRG709); the Finnish Cultural Foundation; the DIWA project; the New Zealand ASEAN Scholarship; ERANET-LAC project METHANOBASE (ELAC2014 DCC-0092); the National Geographic Society; the Czech Science Foundation project No. 22-33245S; the limnological campaign on Lake Lugano coordinated by the International Commission for the Protection of Italian-Swiss Waters (CIPAIS), supported by funding from CIPAIS and Dipartimento del Territorio del Cantone Ticino. Any use of trade, firm, or product names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Government.
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J.S.R. and A.S.L.L. organized the project, led data acquisition, compiled the data, and wrote the original draft of the manuscript. All authors were substantively involved in the following: (1) either providing data or extracting data from publications, (2) data quality checks and methods description, and (3) writing, reviewing and editing the manuscript. All authors approved the final version of this manuscript prior to submission.
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Rabaey, J.S., Lewis, A.S.L., Attermeyer, K. et al. Depth-resolved carbon dioxide and methane concentrations in 522 lakes, ponds, and reservoirs worldwide. Sci Data (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06751-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06751-0
