About the project
Climate change is expected to affect lake ecosystems in many ways. In boreal systems, changes in dissolved organic matter and nutrients will affect light levels, thermal regimes, productivity and community structure. This project will address these responses by use of existing databases, refinement and integration of existing models and by experiments and field studies. The multidisciplinary project group will build on the extensive databases on lakes and boreal catchments in Norway, Sweden and Finland combined with predictive steady-state (space-for-time) models that have recently been developed and tested for Norwegian catchments as well as existing, dynamic, process-oriented models. The goal is to establish causal links between the drivers climate change and N+S deposition and catchment properties on export fluxes of dissolved organic carbon (DOC), and the key nutrient elements nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P). Projections will be made driven by various scenarios of future climate change and N+S deposition. The work will build on statistical tools, GIS-information and climate-related statistical modelling both at the catchment and lake level. These tools will be used to estimate lake ecosystem responses. The focus will be on: 1. Effects on primary production due to changed loads of DOC (determining light climate), changed inputs of nutrients and changed N-deposition. 2. Effects on net ecosystem heterotrophy (and thus CO2 export) related to the same changes. 3. Effects on nutrient limitation (N vs. P) related to changed loads of nutrients and changed N-deposition. 4. Effects on phytoplankton cell size related to changed temperature and nutrients. 5. Community effects focusing on selected species susceptible to DOC and temperature.
Collaborators
Finnish Environmental Institute
Norwegian Institute for Water Research
Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Uppsala
Department of Geosciences, University of Oslo
Department of Chemistry, University of Oslo
Financing
This project is funded by The Research Council of Norway.
Period
01.04.2013 - 31.03.2016