Lakes as sentinels of climate change

By Rita Adrian, C. O’Reilly, Horacio Zagarese, S. Baines, D. Hessen, W. Keller, D. Livingstone, R. Sommaruga, D. Straile, E. van Donk and 2 more. Limnology and Oceanography, 2009

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While there is a general sense that lakes can act as sentinels of climate change, their efficacy has not been thoroughly analyzed. We identified the key response variables within a lake that act as indicators of the effects of climate change on both the lake and the catchment. These variables reflect a wide range of physical, chemical, and biological responses to climate. However, the efficacy of the different indicators is affected by regional response to climate change, characteristics of the catchment, and lake mixing regimes. Thus, particular indicators or combinations of indicators are more effective for different lake types and geographic regions. The extraction of climate signals can be further complicated by the influence of other environmental changes, such as eutrophication or acidification, and the equivalent reverse phenomena, in addition to other land‐use influences. In many cases, however, confounding factors can be addressed through analytical tools such as detrending or filtering. Lakes are effective sentinels for climate change because they are sensitive to climate, respond rapidly to change, and integrate information about changes in the catchment.

Subfields: Environmental Chemistry, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/52b31d1336fab0940e323fe3f49aeb54d08ee5f6

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Citations in the corpus

Phytoplankton functional type modelling: Running before we can walk? A critical evaluation of the current state of knowledge (2016, background): “…models that ave been developed in freshwater ecosystems (lakes, reservoirs, nd rivers) to address eutrophication problems such as harmul algal blooms (Kim et al., 2014), and to evaluate the potential mpact of climate change or other environmental changes on lake henology (Adrian et al., 2009).”
The role of uncertainty in climate change adaptation strategies—A Danish water management example (2013, background): “This, in turn, will lead to a poorer ecological status of lakes, with higher levels of potentially toxic cyanobacteria (bluegreen algae) in eutrophic lakes and lower water clarity (Adrian et al. 2009).”
Impact of climate warming on European inland waters (2014, background): “6 °C per decade was reported from Lake Stensjön, Sweden (Adrian et al. 2009).”
Temperature and the size of freshwater phytoplankton (2020, background): “Warming causes lakes to stratify earlier in spring and de-stratify later in autumn (Adrian et al., 2009), lengthening the duration and increasing the stability of stratification (Kraemer et al., 2015), with potentially longer optimal growth periods for eurythermic plankton (Winder & Sommer, 2012).”
Transparency, Geomorphology and Mixing Regime Explain Variability in Trends in Lake Temperature and Stratification Across Northeastern North America (1975-2014) (2017, background): “Globally, surface water temperatures are warming in response to climate drivers, primarily air temperature warming [5,12,15], and this has been documented across wide geographic regions over the past several decades [12,13,16].”