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Lakes are essential ecosystems that provide a large number of ecosystem services whose quality is strongly impacted by human pressures. Optimal uses of lakes require adapted management practices which in turn rely on physico-chemical and biological monitoring. Long-term ecological monitoring provides large sets of environmental data. When such data are available, they have to be associated to metadata and to be stored properly to be accessible and useable by the scientific community. We present a data informatics system accessible to anyone who requests it. Maintained online since 2014 (https://si-ola.inrae.fr), it is originated from the Observatory on LAkes (OLA). It contains long-term data from 4 peri-alpine lakes (Lakes Aiguebelette, Annecy, Bourget, Geneva/Léman) and 24 high-altitude lakes of the northern French Alps. We describe the generated long-term data series, the data type, the methodologies and quality control procedures, and the information system where data are made accessible. Data use is allowed under the condition of providing reference to the original source. We show here how such a platform clearly enhances data sharing and scientific collaboration. Various studies referring to these data are regularly published in peer-reviewed journals; providing in fine a better understanding of lakes’ ecosystems functioning under local and global pressures.

Anthropogenic sources of chloride in a lake catchment, including road salt, fertilizer, and wastewater, can elevate the chloride concentration in freshwater lakes above background levels. Rising chloride concentrations can impact lake ecology and ecosystem services such as fisheries and the use of lakes as drinking water sources. To analyze the spatial extent and magnitude of increasing chloride concentrations in freshwater lakes, we amassed a database of 529 lakes in Europe and North America that had greater than or equal to ten years of chloride data. For each lake, we calculated climate statistics of mean annual total precipitation and mean monthly air temperatures from gridded global datasets. We also quantified land cover metrics, including road density and impervious surface, in buffer zones of 100 to 1,500 m surrounding the perimeter of each lake. This database represents the largest global collection of lake chloride data. We hope that long-term water quality measurements in areas outside Europe and North America can be added to the database as they become available in the future.