Central and Eastern Siberian High Latitude Lake Hydrochemistry

We present a long-year data collection of freshwater chemistry from 590 high latitude lakes based on water sampling during our past expeditions in the Central and Eastern Siberian continuous permafrost regions. We compiled and standardised all acquired seasonal limnological data on major ions, alkalinity, pH and Electrical Conductivity including time series of data from lakes that we sampled repeatedly. The data collection encompasses diverse Siberian regions with numerous lakes along climate and vegetation gradients in the Khatanga and central Yakutian lowlands, to the glacial lakes of the Chukotka mountain region in Eastern Siberia and the central Lena Delta in the Arctic zone. 

The data collection is rich in standardised metadata following the metadata schema of the International Generic Sample Number (IGSN), which provides a unique and persistent identifier for physical objects (samples). Within the project FAIR Workflows to establish IGSN for Samples in the Helmholtz Association (FAIR WISH), funded by the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration Platform (HMC), we customised the GFZ-specific IGSN schema to better describe lakes and water samples in a hierarchical (parent and child) scheme with standardised metadata on lake and sample characteristics, ecoregions, principal investigators and many more.

This standardised data collection will be made available in the PANGAEA data repository (www.pangaea.de) to enable analyses of land-to-lake geochemical fluxes and will support biodiversity, biogeochemical, bioindicator and many more analyses. In this presentation, we visualize the data in form of Piper and Schoeller plots in order to categorize the water bodies and investigate their geographic distribution and links to catchment vegetation, active layer depth, permafrost disturbances and lithology.