Water resources of the Lakes of Russia

Abstract

Presented are the results from qualitatively assessing the water resources of the lakes of the RF for all of the federal districts and the constituent entities of the Russian Federation involved in them. The assessment was made in the Institute of Limnology, Russian Academy of Sciences, following an ingenious technique that implies using real-time satellite-acquired data and the capabilities of the Google Earth program. Within the RF, interpretation covered the water bodies of different origins (either natural or artificial), including the lakes with a surface area of more than 0.01 km2. As a result, data were obtained for the volume of water resources contained in the water bodies of the RF, having a natural origin. It was found that, in spite of the huge lake resources, their distribution across the country’s territory is extremely uneven and is weakly correlated with the main centers of population and economic development. The most well-developed territories of the RF often experience a shortage of water resources, whereas the poorly developed regions are endowed with an immense potential of lake waters. Anthropogenic pressure leads to an even larger unevenness of lake water resource distribution. A comparison of the present-day lake areas as obtained from satellite images for the 2000s with cadastre assessment data for the 1960s has shown some decrease in the lake water resources for the European part of the country. A decrease in the surface area of the lakes and a drying of a number of natural water bodies were revealed for the economically most welldeveloped regions, both in the south of the Russian Plain and in a number of its central regions. On the other hand, the lake water resources of the RF were increased by creating man-made water bodies to contain about 890 km3 of water.