2022 Early Hearing Detection & Intervention Virtual Conference

March 13 - 15, 2022

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5/24/2018 | 2:30 PM - 2:45 PM | WINTER PRECIPITATION AND SUMMER TEMPERATURE PREDICT LAKE ECOSYSTEM PROPERTIES AT MACROSCALES | 310 B

WINTER PRECIPITATION AND SUMMER TEMPERATURE PREDICT LAKE ECOSYSTEM PROPERTIES AT MACROSCALES

Climate change can have strong effects on aquatic ecosystems, including disrupting nutrient cycling and mediating processes that affect primary production. However, because past studies have been conducted mostly on individual or small groups of ecosystems, it is challenging to predict how future climate change will affect ecosystem processes at broad spatial scales. We used climate metrics to predict lake ecosystem properties related to nutrient concentrations and primary production in ~11,000 north temperate lakes across broad gradients in climate and ecological context using a novel machine learning model. We found that climate metrics related to winter precipitation and summer temperature were strong predictors of lake nutrients and productivity, but that there was variation in the magnitude and direction of the relationship between climate metrics and lake ecosystem properties. Our results predict that future climate change scenarios of increased summer temperatures will lead to variable but positive effects in nutrients or algal biomass across lakes but that increased winter precipitation will have more neutral but highly variable effects. These findings emphasize the importance of heterogeneity in the response of individual ecosystems to climate, and are a caution to extrapolating responses across space.

Landscape
Nutrients
Primary Production

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Presenters/Authors

Sarah M Collins (), University of Wyoming, sarah.collins@uwyo.edu;