Lakes Bathymetry in Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, Alaska: Data Release.

In 2005 the National Park Service funded an expedition to characterize the freshwater resources in the northernmost National Parklands in Alaska (Bowden et al., 2005). The primary purpose of this project was to extend the limited base of data and knowledge about the freshwater resources of the Gates of the Arctic Park and Preserve and the Noatak National Preserve. This initiative is part of the National Park Service’s (NPS) Inventory and Monitoring program (Lawler et al., 2009). The 2005 field initiative included landscape and freshwater ecosystem experts from the University of Vermont, the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, the University of Alabama, Utah State University, and the Marine Biological Laboratory. Substantial assistance in preparation and execution of the field work was provided by staff from the NPS Arctic Parks Network (ARCN) in Fairbanks. The study area for the 2005 effort focused on a portion of the Noatak River from 12-Mile Creek to Lake Matcharak in the western region of the Gates of the Arctic Park and Preserve. The team was deployed 13 July, 2005 and operated continuously in the field until taken out on 26 July 2005. Over the course of the two week field period a total of 20 different stream reaches and 11 lakes were assessed. This data release publishes the bathymetric data and digitized polygon lake perimeters for the following lakes: Big Guy Lake, Kipmik Lake, Lake Ermi, Lake Gigi, Lake Pjolene, Matcharak Lake, Omelaktavik Lake, Skeeter Lake, Unknown-1, Unknown-2, Unknown-4,

Key words: Lake, Alaska, Bathymetry, Arctic, Pond, Big Guy Lake, Kipmik Lake, Lake Ermi, Lake Gigi, Lake Pjolene, Matcharak Lake, Omelaktavik Lake, Skeeter Lake, Unknown-1, Unknown-2, Unknown-4

Bathymetric Data
Detailed bathymetric surveys were conducted using a GPS-linked, Garmin-153C echosounder attached to an inflatable kayak which was paddled across lakes along specified transect lines. The echosounder recorded water depth as an algorithm of reflections from the bottom of a 70 kHz pulse of sound (0.4 msec in duration) as the GPS unit recorded the corresponding latitude and longitude.

Lake Perimeters
Lake perimeters were digitized by eye from imagery in Quantum GIS. The perimeter digitizations were added to the bathymetric data with depth values of zero in order to define the edges of the lakes and extend the bathymetric dataset.

Files
This data release consists of the following files:

File	Description
Bathymetry.csv	Bathymetry data.
Bathymetry_Metadata.csv	Metadata for Bathymetry.csv including column names, descriptions and units of measure.
LakePerimeters.geojson	Lake perimeters spatial layer, digitized from imagery. Multipolygon. Geographic Coordinate System, WGS 1984.
ARCN-Freshwater-Lakes-Bathymetry-Data-Release-Report.html	This report. HTML format. 2.7 Mb
Columns and Data Types
Table 2. Columns descriptions and units of measure.
ColumnName	DataType	Description	UnitsOfMeasure
Lake	character	Lake name	
Depth	numeric	Lake name	Meters
Latitude	numeric	Latitude	Decimal Degrees, Geographic Coordinate System, WGS1984.
Longitude	numeric	Longitude	Decimal Degrees, Geographic Coordinate System, WGS1984.
BID	integer	Unique ID	
SiteName	character	Site name

Tags: bathymetry, big-guy-lake, kipmik-lake, lake-gigi, lake-pjolene, matcharak-lake, national-park, noatak, noatak-river, omelaktavik-lake, skeeter-lake, toolik-lake, unknown-1, unknown-2, unknown-3, unknown-4
Organization: Department of the Interior