Fig. 3: Outsized role of small lakes.

a Histograms of relative areal changes derived for global lakes partitioned into different size groups between given time periods. b Absolute areal changes in lakes within different size groups between time periods, including both positive and negative changes. c Relative contributions of small lakes to lake size variability between different periods, estimated as the proportion of the absolute areal changes in small lakes within a given 1° × 1° grid cell (see Methods). The gray areas indicate regions with insufficient satellite coverage in the early periods.