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Compared to the well-studied open water of the ''growing'' season, under-ice conditions in lakes are characterized by low and rather constant temperature, slow water movements, limited light availability, and reduced exchange with the surrounding landscape. These conditions interact with ice-cover duration to shape microbial processes in temperate lakes and ultimately influence the phenology of community and ecosystem processes. We review the current knowledge on microorganisms in seasonally frozen lakes. Specifically, we highlight how under-ice conditions alter lake physics and the ways that this can affect the distribution and metabolism of auto-and heterotrophic microorganisms. We identify functional traits that we hypothesize are important for understanding under-ice dynamics and discuss how these traits influence species interactions. As ice coverage duration has already been seen to reduce as air temperatures have warmed, the dynamics of the underice microbiome are important for understanding and predicting the dynamics and functioning of seasonally frozen lakes in the near future.The quality of freshwater, which is tightly tied to many essential ecosystem services, is influenced in large part by the activities of microbial communities. In inland waters, as in other ecosystems, microorganisms are at the hub of most biogeochemical processes and largely control ecosystem functioning via their metabolic activities. However, attempts to describe the taxonomy and ecology of the freshwater microbiome mainly involve samples collected during the icefree season and, hence, largely neglect microbial communities and their activities during the ice-covered period. Knowledge about the year-round ecological and biogeochemical traits of typical freshwater microorganisms is required to understand when and where certain microorganisms will appear and how they will influence other organisms or biogeochemical processes and, hence, water quality. Together, this information will improve our ability to predict and model freshwater ecosystem and biogeochemical dynamics and to determine their role in the landscapes in the face of environmental change.A large number of lakes, particularly those situated at high altitude and the numerous high-latitude lakes in the temperate and boreal climate zones, are seasonally covered by ice for more than 40% of the year (Walsh et al. 1998). Despite this, surprisingly little is known about the ecology, diversity, and metabolism of microorganisms that reside under the ice cover in such lakes (Salonen et al. 2009). The traditional view is that ecosystems subjected to low temperatures are ''on hold'' and that cellular adaptations for survival at low temperatures control the composition of the winter microbial community, which awaits environmental conditions more conducive for growth. This traditional concept fails to recognize that the winter season affects the ecology and metabolic features of freshwater microorganisms, as well as their involvement in food webs and global biogeochemical c...

Exchange of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4)across inland water surfaces is an important component of the terrestrial carbon (C) balance. We investigated the fluxes of these two gases across the surface of oligotrophic Lake Stechlin using a floating chamber approach. The normalized gas transfer rate for CH4 (k600,CH4) was on average 2.5 times higher than that for CO2 (k600,CO2) and consequently higher than Fickian transport. Because of its low solubility relative to CO2, the enhanced CH4 flux is possibly explained by the presence of microbubbles in the lake’s surface layer. These microbubbles may originate from atmospheric bubble entrainment or gas supersaturation (i.e., O2) or both. Irrespective of the source, we determined that an average of 145 L m−2 d−1 of gas is required to exit the surface layer via microbubbles to produce the observed elevated k600,CH4. As k600 values are used to estimate CH4 pathways in aquatic systems, the presence of microbubbles could alter the resulting CH4 and perhaps C balances. These microbubbles will also affect the surface fluxes of other sparingly soluble gases in inland waters, including O2 and N2

[1] Penetrative convection is discussed where the instability is driven by radiative heating of water below the temperature of maximum density. Convection of this type occurs in ice-covered freshwater lakes in late spring, when the snow cover vanishes and solar radiation is absorbed beneath the ice cover. The vertical temperature structure, bulk mixed layer scaling, and mixed layer deepening are examined for a number of temperate and polar lakes. A bulk mixed layer scaling for this type of convection is based on energy arguments underlying the classical Deardorff convective scaling. The depth of the convective layer serves as an appropriate length scale. However, a modified scale that takes account of the energetics of a distributed radiation source term replaces the surface buoyancy flux velocity scale used by Deardorff. The scaling compares favorably with large-eddy simulations of turbulence kinetic energy (TKE) and with both observations and large-eddy simulations of the TKE dissipation rate. Mixed layer deepening is simulated with a model of convection beneath lake ice. The model describes the structure of the stably stratified layer just beneath the ice with a stationary solution to the heat transfer equation; the structure of the entrainment layer is parameterized with a zero-order jump approach. The entrainment equation is derived from the mixed layer TKE budget and bulk mixed layer scaling. Entrainment regimes characteristic of convection beneath ice are analyzed. It is shown that if the Deardorff convective velocity scale is replaced with a scale incorporating the distributed buoyancy flux, the entrainment equation describing atmospheric and oceanic convective boundary layers also applies beneath the ice. Model predictions compare well with data from observations in a number of lakes. We propose and compare with observations an extension of the mixed layer model that allows for the inclusion of salinity. Although the salt concentration is low in most temperate and polar lakes, its dynamical effect can be significant close to the temperature of maximum density.

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Modeling studies examining the effect of lakes on regional and global climate, as well as studies on the influence of climate variability and change on aquatic ecosystems, are surveyed. Fully coupled atmosphere-land surface-lake climate models that could be used for both of these types of study simultaneously do not presently exist, though there are many applications that would benefit from such models. It is argued here that current understanding of physical and biogeochemical processes in freshwater systems is sufficient to begin to construct such models, and a path forward is proposed. The largest impediment to fully representing lakes in the climate system lies in the handling of lakes that are too small to be explicitly resolved by the climate model, and that make up the majority of the lake-covered area at the resolutions currently used by global and regional climate models. Ongoing development within the hydrological sciences community and continual improvements in model resolution should help ameliorate this issue.It has been long understood that lakes and reservoirs can influence local and regional climate, as open water has significantly different radiative and thermal properties compared with soil or vegetated surfaces. It is not surprising then, that various attempts have been made over the years to include the effects of terrestrial surface water in global and regional climate modeling studies, though the effects considered are usually limited to the flux exchange of moisture, heat, and momentum with the overlying atmosphere. On the other hand, the effect of climate variability and change on thermal structure, water quality, and aquatic ecosystems-also long known to be important-is generally only evaluated in the context of individual lakes or reservoirs. Even though very elaborate models exist for examining these issues, they are generally not run fully coupled with global or regional climate models, presumably because of the computational expense or the complexity of such an exercise (or both). Yet to understand the role of lakes and reservoirs in the climate system, fully coupled models must be developed in which key lacustrine processes relevant on climate timescales are integrated within the climate model. This is especially clear given the recent (and growing) awareness of the importance of lakes and reservoirs in the global carbon balance (St. Louis et al. 2000;Tranvik et al. 2009;Williamson et al. 2009). Nutrient loading, biogeochemical cycling, food webs, and ecosystems will all need to be represented, in addition to the thermal structure, mixing regimes, and ice cover that are usually considered in climate modeling studies (i.e., if lakes and reservoirs are considered at all). Modeling techniques exist for all of these, yet it would appear that a fully coupled atmosphere-land surface-lake model that would meet the needs of both the terrestrial

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The 5-year-long (2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005) studies of the winter thermal structure and the dissolved oxygen (DO) dynamics in Lake Vendyurskoe, Russia, a typical boreal shallow mesotrophic lake of glacial origin, revealed still poorly studied features of lakewide dynamics, such as net lateral heat flux towards deeper parts of a lake and development of the anaerobic zone over the deepest points of the lake basin. We estimated magnitude of the heat transport along the bottom slope based on scaling analysis. The seasonal changes in DO concentration appear to be controlled mostly by biochemical consumption. We identify four factors controlling the extent of anoxic zones in shallow ice-covered lakes: (1) the amount of organic matter stored in the bottom layers, including the sediments surface during the autumnal bloom; (2) the length of the ice-covered period; (3) heat content of bottom sediments; and (4) the initial water temperatures at the time of the ice cover formation.