The Response of Freshwater Ecosystems to Climate Variability Associated with the North Atlantic Oscillation

By D. Straile, D. Livingstone, G. Weyhenmeyer, D. G. George. 2013

184 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) affects the physics, hydrology, chemistry and biology of freshwater ecosystems over a large part of the Northern Hemisphere. Physical impacts of the NAO include effects on lake temperature profiles, lake ice phenology, river runoff and lake water levels. These physical and hydrological responses influence the chemistry and biology of fresh waters by affecting the leaching of nutrients from the soil and by altering the distribution of nutrients and oxygen in lakes. Finally, the population dynamics of freshwater organisms on several trophic levels-including autotrophs, herbivores and vertebrate predators-are directly and indirectly linked to the NAO via food-web interactions. As a result, the effects of mild winters associated with the positive index phase of the NAO can influence the food-web characteristics of lakes in summer. A considerable body of evidence documents the importance of these indirect and food-web mediated effects of the NAO, which might even result in ecosystem regime shifts. Owing to the large-scale impact of the NAO, lakes exhibit spatial coherence over large areas with respect to both physical and biological properties. This coherence is modified by geographical factors such as altitude and latitude, and by lake-specific characteristics such as depth and trophic status.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2c36e55ee7136e7d8fa4ff4615e63d1027330b9a

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In Oceanography

1. Rita Adrian
2. M. Forchhammer
3. E. Post
4. Dieter Gerten

Citations in the corpus

• Life‐history traits of lake plankton species may govern their phenological response to climate warming (2006, background): “, 2002) to climate warming is changes in phenology (i.e. annually reoccurring phenomena especially in relation to climate such as the timing of first occurrence, or the timing when population maxima are reached; for a review, see Gerten & Adrian, 2002; Straile et al., 2003).”
• CYLINDROSPERMOPSIS RACIBORSKII (CYANOBACTERIA) INVASION AT MID‐LATITUDES: SELECTION, WIDE PHYSIOLOGICAL TOLERANCE, ORGLOBALWARMING? 1 (2004, background): “The influence of the NAO on the lake temperatures particularly in winter and early spring could be more significant (Livingston and Dokulil 2001, Scheffer et al. 2001, Anneville et al. 2002, Straile 2002).”
• Using large-scale climate indices in climate change ecology studies (2004, background): “…climate Recently, comprehensive reviews (Forchhammer 2001; Stenseth et al. 2002; Walther et al. 2002; Drinkwater et al. 2003; Mysterud et al. 2003; Straile et al. 2003) summarise the vast number of studies demonstrating significant co-variance between large-scale climate indices and a range of…”