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Depth is a fundamental property of lakes, essential for understanding and quantifying a range of biological, chemical, and physical processes of individual lakes as well as the collective functioning of the millions of lakes across the globe. Despite this importance, lake depth is rarely available for large numbers of lakes across the broad scales of regions and continents. We describe a new open‐access dataset, LAGOS‐US DEPTH, which contains 17,675 maximum depths and 6,137 mean depths for lakes in the conterminous United States. These data represent one of the largest compilations of lake depths in the world and are connected to other data products through the LAGOS‐US research platform. Here, we describe characteristics of lake maximum depth across the conterminous United States and identify gaps in data coverage that we encourage other researchers to fill by linking their own depth datasets for lakes within the LAGOS‐US spatial footprint. Extending this open‐access effort to include other regions and countries across the globe to build a more comprehensive and representative database of lake depth would better position scientists to quantify and articulate the critical roles that lakes play globally in biogeochemical cycling, maintaining biodiversity, and in maintaining the many ecosystem services that lakes provide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Convention on Biological Diversity (https://www.cbd.int/) recommends globally protecting ≥ 17% of ecologically representative freshwaters by 2020 to sustain critical ecosystem services and rapidly declining freshwater biodiversity. We examined whether current conservation efforts meet this target for lakes (≥ 1 ha) across the continental U.S. and Environmental Protection Agency ecoregions using the U.S. Protected Areas Database. How one defines lake protection matters: 17.8% of lakes fell within multiuse or strictly protected areas, but only 7.5% of lakes had ≥ 80% of their catchments in strictly protected areas. Protected lakes occurred disproportionately in the lake‐poor western U.S. and most lake‐rich regions fell short of the 17% target. Lakes connected to streams and other lakes were disproportionately protected relative to headwater and isolated lakes, which are important for ecosystem services and biodiversity. Meeting conservation targets requires protecting thousands of additional U.S. lakes and catchments across more diverse ecological settings and explicitly considering connectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]