National Lakes Assessment 2012: Technical Report

This document, the National Lakes Assessment 2012: Technical Report, accompanies the National Lakes Assessment 2012: A Collaborative Survey of Lakes in the United States and related on-line materials. The National Lakes Assessment (NLA) is a collaboration among the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), states, tribes, and other partners. It is part of the National Aquatic Resource Surveys (NARS) program design to conduct national scale assessments of aquatic resources. The NLA 2012 provides the second assessment at national and regional scales of the ecological and recreational condition of lakes. This assessment was accomplished by collecting and analyzing data from across the conterminous United States. The National Lakes Assessment 2012: A Collaborative Survey of Lakes in the United States (the Public Report) is not a technical document, but rather a report geared toward a broad, public audience. The NLA 2012 presents information from the second National Lakes Assessment. It provides national-scale assessments and also compares the condition of lakes to those from the earlier NLA 2007 conducted by EPA and its partners. You can find results for regional scales and comparisons between natural lakes and reservoirs using our interactive dashboard at https://nationallakesassessment.epa.gov/. The technical report is a supplemental document that serves as a technical reference to support findings presented in the public report and on-line.