Environmental Impacts—Lake Ecosystems

Abstract

The North Sea region contains a vast number of lakes; from shallow, highly eutrophic water bodies in agricultural areas to deep, oligotrophic systems in pristine high-latitude or highaltitude areas. These freshwaters and the biota they contain are highly vulnerable to climate change. As largely closed systems, lakes are ideally suited to studying climate-induced effects via changes in ice cover, hydrology and temperature, as well as via biological communities (phenology, species and size distribution, food-web dynamics, life-history traits, growth and respiration, nutrient dynamics and ecosystem metabolism). This chapter focuses on change in natural lakes and on parameters for which their climate-driven responses have major impacts on ecosystem properties such as productivity, community composition, metabolism and biodiversity. It also points to the importance of addressing different temporal scales and variability in driving and response variables along with threshold-driven responses to environmental forces. Exceedance of critical thresholds may result in abrupt changes in particular elements of an ecosystem. Modelling climate-driven physical responses like ice-cover duration, stratification periods and thermal profiles in lakes have shown major advances, and the chapter provide recent achievements in this field for northern lakes. Finally, there is a tentative summary of the level of certainty for key climatic impacts on freshwater ecosystems.

Wall turbulence response to surface cooling and formation of strongly stable stratified boundary layers

“…black carbon 9 ) in near-surface regions 10,11 . The SBL can also adversely impact the local ecology by rapid depletion of nutrients due to the decrease in surface layer mixing 12,13 . From the perspective of wind energy, stable stratification can cause a significant reduction in the total power output of large wind farms 14 .…”

New insights into lake responses to rapid climate change: the Younger Dryas in Lake Gościąż, central Poland

“…Lakes are considered as sentinels of climate change since they respond immediately, but also incorporate effects of climate change within the catchment (Adrian et al 2009(Adrian et al , 2016. However, lake responses to climate change are complex, due to the involvement of tightly coupled physical, chemical and biological processes that operate on a wide range of time scales from days to millennia (Ramisch et al 2018).…”

“…Numerous studies based on modern observations address how different compartments of lake systems respond to climate change (e.g. Adrian et al 2016). However, there are still synergistic and complex lake response mechanisms that are not fully understood (Havens & Jeppesen 2018).…”

“…The YD is characterized by pronounced seasonality with strong winter cooling (Isarin et al 1998;Denton et al 2005) and relatively mild but short summers (Schenk et al 2018). Changes in seasonality are considered crucial for lake system response, because spring and early summer is a critical time window for the timing and rates of overturn and related biological effects (Peeters et al 2007;Adrian et al 2016). Therefore, varved lake sediment records with seasonal time resolution are most suitable recorders of seasonal effects.…”

Potential Impacts of Induced Bank Filtration on Surface Water Quality: A Conceptual Framework for Future Research

“…A full assessment goes beyond the scope of this study, but effects of IBF-induced temperature increases in summer can be similar to those of climate change-induced warming, especially for benthic organisms in the littoral zone which is highly likely to be warmer with IBF in summer due to the prevention of cold groundwater inflow. Overviews of climate warming effects on lake and river ecosystems are provided by Adrian et al [94] and Whitehead et al [154], respectively.…”