Sixty years of environmental change in the world's largest freshwater lake – Lake Baikal, Siberia

Abstract

High-resolution data collected over the past 60 years by a single family of Siberian scientists on Lake Baikal reveal significant warming of surface waters and long-term changes in the basal food web of the world's largest, most ancient lake. Attaining depths over 1.6 km, Lake Baikal is the deepest and most voluminous of the world's great lakes. Increases in average water temperature (1.21 °C since 1946), chlorophyll a (300% since 1979), and an influential group of zooplankton grazers (335% increase in cladocerans since 1946) may have important implications for nutrient cycling and food web dynamics. Results from multivariate autoregressive (MAR) modeling suggest that cladocerans increased strongly in response to temperature but not to algal biomass, and cladocerans depressed some algal resources without observable fertilization effects. Changes in Lake Baikal are particularly significant as an integrated signal of long-term regional warming, because this lake is expected to be among those most resistant to climate change due to its tremendous volume. These findings highlight the importance of accessible, long-term monitoring data for understanding ecosystem response to large-scale stressors such as climate change.

Thermal structure and response to long‐term climatic changes in Lake Qiandaohu, a deep subtropical reservoir in China

“…3d; Table 1), indicating that air temperature was the dominant factor affecting water temperature. Such significant positive correlations have been widely observed in other lakes (Coats et al 2006;Hampton et al 2008;Adrian et al 2009). As water depth increased, the determination coefficient between air temperature and water temperature markedly decreased.…”

“…Previous studies have shown that regional-scale air temperatures and surface-water temperatures are highly correlated (Coats et al 2006;Hampton et al 2008;Adrian et al 2009). Thus, the air temperature increase caused by global climate change is anticipated to have a profound effect worldwide on aquatic ecosystems, including their chemical and physical properties and biotic and ecosystemscale responses.…”

Winter thermal structure of Lake Superior

“…Recent studies have investigated the thermal characteristics of large lakes using a variety of methods, including direct, in situ measurements (Verburg et al 2003;Coats et al 2006;Hampton et al 2008), remote sensing techniques (Schneider et al 2009;Schneider and Hook 2010), and other sources, such as historical records of ice cover (Magnuson et al 2000). Collecting data in large lakes requires overcoming challenges not encountered when making measurements on land or in small lakes, and few time-series or other observations go back more than a few decades, (McCormick and Fahnenstiel 1999;Verburg et al 2003;Vollmer et al 2005).…”

Environmental Impacts—Lake Ecosystems

“…Arhonditsis et al 2004;Coats et al 2006;Austin and Colman 2008), East Africa (e.g. O'Reilly et al 2003;Verburg et al 2003), Siberia (Hampton et al 2008) and Antarctica (Quayle et al 2002). A recent study based on satellite thermal infrared images from 1985 onwards (Schneider and Hook 2010) confirmed that lake surface temperatures have been undergoing a long-term increase over large areas of the northern hemisphere.…”