Lakes and impoundments are an important source of methane (CH
), a potent greenhouse gas, to the atmosphere. A recent analysis shows aquatic productivity (i.e., eutrophication) is an important driver ...of CH
emissions from lentic waters. Considering that aquatic productivity will increase over the next century due to climate change and a growing human population, a concomitant increase in aquatic CH
emissions may occur. We simulate the eutrophication of lentic waters under scenarios of future nutrient loading to inland waters and show that enhanced eutrophication of lakes and impoundments will substantially increase CH
emissions from these systems (+30-90%) over the next century. This increased CH
emission has an atmospheric impact of 1.7-2.6 Pg C-CO
-eq y
, which is equivalent to 18-33% of annual CO
emissions from burning fossil fuels. Thus, it is not only important to limit eutrophication to preserve fragile water supplies, but also to avoid acceleration of climate change.
Inland waters (lakes, reservoirs, streams, and rivers) are often substantial methane (CH₄) sources in the terrestrial landscape. They are, however, not yet well integrated in global greenhouse gas ...(GHG) budgets. Data from 474 freshwater ecosystems and the most recent global water area estimates indicate that freshwaters emit at least 103 teragrams of CH₄ year⁻¹, corresponding to 0.65 petagrams of C as carbon dioxide (CO₂) equivalents year⁻¹, offsetting 25% of the estimated land carbon sink. Thus, the continental GHG sink may be considerably overestimated, and freshwaters need to be recognized as important in the global carbon cycle.
Lakes and impoundments are important sources of greenhouse gases (GHG: i.e., CO2, CH4, N2O), yet global emission estimates are based on regionally biased averages and elementary upscaling. We ...assembled the largest global dataset to date on emission rates of all three GHGs and found they covary with lake size and trophic state. Fitted models were upscaled to estimate global emission using global lake size inventories and a remotely sensed global lake productivity distribution. Traditional upscaling approaches overestimated CO2 and N2O emission but underestimated CH4 by half. Our upscaled size‐productivity weighted estimates (1.25–2.30 Pg of CO2‐equivalents annually) are nearly 20% of global CO2 fossil fuel emission with ∼ 75% of the climate impact due to CH4. Moderate global increases in eutrophication could translate to 5–40% increases in the GHG effects in the atmosphere, adding the equivalent effect of another 13% of fossil fuel combustion or an effect equal to GHG emissions from current land use change.
Until recently, small continental waters have been completely ignored in virtually all global processes and cycles. This has resulted from the neglect of these systems and processes by ecologists and ...the assumption that ecosystems with a small areal extent cannot play a major role in global processes. Recent inventories based on modern geographical and mathematical approaches have shown that continental waters occupy nearly twice as much area as was previously believed. Further, these inventories have shown that small lakes and ponds dominate the areal extent of continental waters, correcting a century-long misconception that large lakes are most important. The global importance of any ecosystem type in a process or cycle is the product of the areal extent and the intensity of the process in those ecosystems. Several analyses have shown the disproportionately great intensity of many processes in small aquatic ecosystems, indicating that they play an unexpectedly major role in global cycles. Assessments of the global carbon cycle underscore the need for aquatic scientists to view their work on a global scale in order to respond to the Earth's most pressing environmental problems.Original Abstract: Hasta muy recientemente, las aguas continentales de pequeno volumen se han ignorado completamente en todos los procesos y ciclos globales. Esto ha sido el resultado de la poca consideracion de estos ecosistemas y procesos por los ecologos y de asumir que los ecosistemas que ocupan un area pequena no juegan ningun papel importante en los procesos globales. Inventarios recientes basados en aproximaciones geograficas y matematicas modernas indican que las aguas continentales ocupan casi el doble del area de lo que se creia anteriormente. Ademads, estos inventarios han mostrado que las charcas y lagunas de pequenas dimensiones predominan en la extension superficial de las aguas continentales, corrigiendo la concepcion equivocada de todo un siglo de que los grandes lagos eran los mas importantes. La importancia global de cualquier tipo de ecosistema en un proceso o ciclo es el producto de su superficie por la intensidad del proceso en el ecosistema. Diversos analisis han mostrado la intensidad desproporcionadamente grande de muchos procesos en los pequenos sistemas acuaticos, indicando su sorprendente papel primordial en los ciclos globales. Evaluaciones del ciclo global del carbono ponen de manifiesto la necesidad de que los ecologos acuaticos tengan una vision de su trabajo a escala global, para poder responder a los problemas ambientales mas preocupantes.
Surface water is among Earth's most important resources. Yet, benefit-cost studies often report that the costs of water quality protection exceed its benefits. One possible reason for this seeming ...paradox is that often only a narrow range of local water quality benefits are considered. In particular, the climate damages from water pollution have rarely been quantified. Recent advances in global water science allow the computation of the global methane emission from lakes caused by human nutrient enrichment (eutrophication). Here, we estimate the present value of the global social cost of eutrophication-driven methane emissions from lakes between 2015 and 2050 to be $7.5-$81 trillion (2015 $US), and in a case-study for one well-studied lake (Lake Erie) we find the global value of avoiding eutrophication exceeds local values of either beach use or sport fishing by 10-fold.
1. Global concern about human impact on biological diversity has triggered an intense research agenda on drivers and consequences of biodiversity change in parallel with international policy seeking ...to conserve biodiversity and associated ecosystem functions. Quantifying the trends in biodiversity is far from trivial, however, as recently documented by meta-analyses, which report little if any net change in local species richness through time. 2. Here, we summarise several limitations of species richness as a metric of biodiversity change and show that the expectation of directional species richness trends under changing conditions is invalid. Instead, we illustrate how a set of species turnover indices provide more information content regarding temporal trends in biodiversity, as they reflect how dominance and identity shift in communities over time. 3. We apply these metrics to three monitoring datasets representing different ecosystem types. In all datasets, nearly complete species turnover occurred, but this was disconnected from any species richness trends. Instead, turnover was strongly influenced by changes in species presence (identities) and dominance (abundances). We further show that these metrics can detect phases of strong compositional shifts in monitoring data and thus identify a different aspect of biodiversity change decoupled from species richness. 4. Synthesis and applications: Temporal trends in species richness are insufficient to capture key changes in biodiversity in changing environments. In fact, reductions in environmental quality can lead to transient increases in species richness if immigration or extinction has different temporal dynamics. Thus, biodiversity monitoring programmes need to go beyond analyses of trends in richness in favour of more meaningful assessments of biodiversity change.
More than 41 000 water bodies are listed as impaired by the US Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Water Act. Implementation and enforcement of regulations designed to address these ...impairments can be costly, raising questions about the value of the public benefits derived from improved surface water quality. Here, we assess the recreational value of changes in water quality using freely available geotagged photographs, taken by members of the public, as a proxy for recreational visits to lakes. We found that improved water clarity is associated with increased numbers of visits to lakes and that lake users were willing to incur greater costs to visit clearer lakes. Lake users were willing to travel 56 minutes farther (equivalent to US$22 in travel costs) for every one-meter increase in water clarity in Minnesota and Iowa lakes, when controlling for other lake attributes. Our approach demonstrates the potential for social-media data to inform social-ecological research, including assessment of the recreational benefits of improvements in water quality.
We compiled a lake-water clarity database using publically available, citizen volunteer observations made between 1938 and 2012 across eight states in the Upper Midwest, USA. Our objectives were to ...determine (1) whether temporal trends in lake-water clarity existed across this large geographic area and (2) whether trends were related to the lake-specific characteristics of latitude, lake size, or time period the lake was monitored. Our database consisted of >140,000 individual Secchi observations from 3,251 lakes that we summarized per lake-year, resulting in 21,020 summer averages. Using Bayesian hierarchical modeling, we found approximately a 1% per year increase in water clarity (quantified as Secchi depth) for the entire population of lakes. On an individual lake basis, 7% of lakes showed increased water clarity and 4% showed decreased clarity. Trend direction and strength were related to latitude and median sample date. Lakes in the southern part of our study-region had lower average annual summer water clarity, more negative long-term trends, and greater inter-annual variability in water clarity compared to northern lakes. Increasing trends were strongest for lakes with median sample dates earlier in the period of record (1938-2012). Our ability to identify specific mechanisms for these trends is currently hampered by the lack of a large, multi-thematic database of variables that drive water clarity (e.g., climate, land use/cover). Our results demonstrate, however, that citizen science can provide the critical monitoring data needed to address environmental questions at large spatial and long temporal scales. Collaborations among citizens, research scientists, and government agencies may be important for developing the data sources and analytical tools necessary to move toward an understanding of the factors influencing macro-scale patterns such as those shown here for lake water clarity.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The influence of inland water bodies on the global carbon cycle and the great potential for long-term carbon burial in them is an important component of global limnology. We used paleolimnological ...methods to estimate changes in carbon burial rates through time in a suite of natural lakes in the US state of Iowa which has watersheds that have been heavily modified over the last 150 years. Our results show increasing carbon burial for all lakes in our study as agriculture intensified. Our estimates of carbon burial rates, before land clearance, are similar to the published worldwide averages for nutrient-poor lakes. In nearly all the cases, burial rates increased to very high levels (up to 200 g C m⁻²y⁻¹) following agricultural development. These results support the idea that the increased autochthonous and allochthonous carbon flux, related to anthropogenic change, leads to higher rates of carbon burial. Further, these results imply that the fraction of global carbon buried by lakes will be increasingly important in the future if worldwide trends in anthropogenic eutrophication continue.
We explore the role of lakes in carbon cycling and global climate, examine the mechanisms influencing carbon pools and transformations in lakes, and discuss how the metabolism of carbon in the inland ...waters is likely to change in response to climate. Furthermore, we project changes as global climate change in the abundance and spatial distribution of lakes in the biosphere, and we revise the estimate for the global extent of carbon transformation in inland waters. This synthesis demonstrates that the global annual emissions of carbon dioxide from inland waters to the atmosphere are similar in magnitude to the carbon dioxide uptake by the oceans and that the global burial of organic carbon in inland water sediments exceeds organic carbon sequestration on the ocean floor. The role of inland waters in global carbon cycling and climate forcing may be changed by human activities, including construction of impoundments, which accumulate large amounts of carbon in sediments and emit large amounts of methane to the atmosphere. Methane emissions are also expected from lakes on melting permafrost. The synthesis presented here indicates that (1) inland waters constitute a significant component of the global carbon cycle, (2) their contribution to this cycle has significantly changed as a result of human activities, and (3) they will continue to change in response to future climate change causing decreased as well as increased abundance of lakes as well as increases in the number of aquatic impoundments.
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