Modelling lake cyanobacterial blooms: Disentangling the climate-driven impacts of changing mixed depth and water temperature

Citation

Gray E, Elliott JA, Mackay EB, Folkard AM, Keenan PO & Jones ID (2019) Modelling lake cyanobacterial blooms: Disentangling the climate-driven impacts of changing mixed depth and water temperature. Freshwater Biology, 64 (12), pp. 2141-2155. https://doi.org/10.1111/fwb.13402

Abstract
1. Climate change is already having profound impacts upon the state and dynamics of lake ecosystems globally. A specific concern is that climate change will continue to promote the growth of phytoplankton, particularly blooms of toxic cyanobacteria, via lake physical processes including warming surface waters and shallowing of the mixed layer. These two mechanisms will have different impacts on lake phytoplankton communities, but their inter‐connectedness has made it difficult to disentangle their independent effects. 2. We fill this knowledge gap by performing 1666 numerical modelling experiments with the phytoplankton community model, PROTECH, in which we separated the independent effects on lake phytoplankton of temperature change and changes in the depth of the surface mixed layer. Given the large global abundance of small lakes (

Keywords
climate change; phytoplankton; Planktothrix; PROTECH; stratification

Journal
Freshwater Biology: Volume 64, Issue 12

People

Dr Ian Jones

Lecturer in Environmental Sensing, Biological and Environmental Sciences