Spatio-temporal assessment of natural lakes in Turkey

Even though some individual studies on natural lakes spread around Turkey over time have been conducted to analyze their preceding characteristics and to monitor their temporal changes, a nation-wide study was lacking. With this study, country-based classification of natural lakes >2000 ha was realized via the use of remote sensing technology and Google Earth Engine platform coupled with different intrinsic properties of the lakes like geographical location, altitude, water-type, intended use, depth. Following a general evaluation of the overall 27 selected lakes in the long- and short-term covering 35 years and 5 years, respectively, some individual lakes were screened representing different water types and more focus on their areal changes in the long- and short-term were analyzed. Landsat images were utilized for the long-term investigation on the areal changes and Sentinel-2 was used in the short-term analysis. The aim of individual inspection of some of the lakes was to put forth a guideline on investigating the cause-and-effect relationship of the areal variations over time/season and thus, to enlighten the decision-makers. Moreover, the long-term meteorological values of the nearest stations to two of the lakes that have been suffering from continuous loss in their surface areas over time were further inspected. As expected, 2^ºC temperature increase over 35 years has shown its alerting signs over the long-term inspection on both of the lakes.