UK Lakes Portal
The purpose of the UK Lakes Portal is to provide the national hub for data and information on the UK's lakes and ponds, providing data, statistics and research outputs for over 40,000 waterbodies. It brings together data from a wide variety of sources and provides a web portal to a database that's been developed collaboratively over many decades.
Category
Environmental data and information
Capabilities
The UK Lakes Portal is a web-based map and data explorer of water bodies across the UK, providing detailed catchment data for all water bodies with a surface area >1 ha. It has polygon data available for all lakes, which is also provided as an open dataset on EIDC. It is designed to link to other lake datasets (using the WBID) and displays research outputs and linked data from APIs such as NRFA, Open WIMS and NBN Atlas. In 2021, an open dataset of the lake polygons (with some attributes) was released on the EIDC:
https://catalogue.ceh.ac.uk/documents/b6b92ce3-dcd7-4f0b-8e43-e937ddf1d4eb
https://catalogue.ceh.ac.uk/documents/b6b92ce3-dcd7-4f0b-8e43-e937ddf1d4eb
Lifecycle
A GIS-based inventory of lakes for Great Britain was originally developed by University College London and the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology in 2004 (Hughes et al. 2004). This version has been updated with additional water bodies from Northern Ireland and supplemented with more recent data during the development and implementation of the Water Framework Directive over the period 2003-2013. It was first published in 2016; version 2 was released in 2018 and a new version based entirely on open source technologies was published in 2023.
Uniqueness
UKCEH are the custodians of the UK Lakes Database and were tasked with developing and maintaining the online portal for the benefit of the UK research community, who regualrly use data from, and give data to, the portal. The WBID is a widely used identifier in UK lake research and the portal is the main hub for information on the UK's lake and ponds and their catchments.
Partners
Originally developed by University College London and the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology in 2004
Lake polygon geometry in Northern Ireland is based upon Crown Copyright and is reproduced with the permission of Land & Property Services under delegated authority from the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, Crown copyright and database rights, EMOU206.2. Northern Ireland Environment Agency Copyright 2015.
Lake polygon geometry in Great Britain is based on Ordnance Survey data and contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Data about species occurrence presented on this page is provided by the National Biodiversity Network (NBN) and its use is subject to the NBN Atlas Terms and Conditions.
Lake polygon geometry in Northern Ireland is based upon Crown Copyright and is reproduced with the permission of Land & Property Services under delegated authority from the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, Crown copyright and database rights, EMOU206.2. Northern Ireland Environment Agency Copyright 2015.
Lake polygon geometry in Great Britain is based on Ordnance Survey data and contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Data about species occurrence presented on this page is provided by the National Biodiversity Network (NBN) and its use is subject to the NBN Atlas Terms and Conditions.
Funding sources
The development of the database was jointly funded by the Environment Agency, Natural England, Countryside Council for Wales (now Natural Resources Wales), and the Scotland and Northern Ireland Forum for Environmental Research (SNIFFER).
Users
Environment Agency, Scottish Environmental Protection Agency and the U.K. statutory conservation bodies
Last updated
11 April 2025 12:11
Contact
Link