WFD Lake Water Bodies: Cycle 3 Ecological and Chemical Status

Environment Agency data provides polygon boundaries and classification results for standing inland surface water bodies in England and Wales under the Water Framework Directive. The dataset includes lakes generally above 50 hectares, plus smaller lakes in protected areas or designated as Sites of Special Scientific Interest. It contains attribution for 2019 and 2022 classification cycles, detailing ecological status/potential and chemical status for each lake water body.

Use Cases

• Assessing ecological status of lakes for regulatory reporting based on classification attributes.
• Mapping lake water bodies for catchment management planning based on polygon geometry.
• Identifying lakes in protected areas or designated as Drinking Water Protected Areas based on inclusion criteria.
• Analyzing trends in chemical status between 2019 and 2022 classification cycles.

Strengths

• Includes specific size thresholds for lake inclusion: generally >50ha, or >5ha in protected areas.
• Provides classification data for two distinct years (2019 and 2022) for temporal comparison.
• Based on authoritative source data from Ordnance Survey (OS OpenMap - Local).

Limitations

• Conflicting classification years are reported across platform entries (2019 vs. 2022), creating ambiguity for the primary dataset version.
• Key metadata such as row count, column names, and specific license terms are not provided in any source.
• The shapefile format is noted to have unspecified limitations.

Provenance

Source

Environment Agency (UK), using Ordnance Survey base data.

Collection Method

Created to meet the requirements of the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD).

Time Range

Cycle 3 classifications for 2019 and 2022.

Freshness

2026-04-07 (metadata update date, though classification data is from 2019/2022)

Geography

England and Wales (implied by data creators Environment Agency and Natural England).