Results from lake water analysis from Rappbode Reservoir in Saxony-Anhalt during the Inland Water Remote Sensing Validation Campaign 2017

It is located in the eastern Harz Mountains (51.74N, 10.89E), supplies about 1 Mio. people with drinking water and is also used for flood protection, recreation and hydropower. The reservoir receives inflows from the streams Rappbode and Hassel and by a controlled water transfer from Bode River.

All this water is passed through pre-dams which were constructed to trap nutrients, sediments and particulate matter thereby reducing the external nutrient load (Rinke et al. 2013, Friese et al. 2014). The water body of is dimictic and nowadays at oligotrophic to mesotrophic state with low P concentrations (TP 10 to 20 µg/L) (Wentzky et al. 2018) but historically underwent eutrophication before 1990. Phytoplankton biomass is relatively low and the algal community is largely dominated by diatoms.