From carbon burial to algae blooms: remote lakes as sentinels of global change
Abstract: Lakes are integrators of their surrounding environment and sentinels for global change. They are among the fastest warming ecosystems on the planet, often exhibiting rates of warming that outpace coincident increases in air temperature. This effect is especially pronounced in our most northern biomes, where the impact of climate change on lake ice has been shown to compound this effect and may have indirect effects on nutrient cycling in these sensitive ecosystems. I will present results from two studies looking at how global change drivers, including warming, have impacted ecosystem functioning in lakes. The first study will look at a set of lakes one of the most protected environments in North America, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, with the purpose of documenting and diagnosing a recent wave of observed harmful algal blooms which have alarmed local resource managers and stakeholders. The second study is pan-Arctic synthesis of carbon burial (sequestration) in lakes. We have assembled the largest dataset of radiosotopically dated sediment cores from the Arctic and quantified the trajectory and magnitude of carbon burial over the last 100 years. Using this dataset, we also produced a predictive model to upscale our estimates to lakes across the entire Arctic and also predict future contributions of Arctic lakes to the global carbon cycle on a progressively warming planet. Together, these studies demonstrate the sensitivity of northern ecosystems to global change and quantify the already significant impacts warming is having on these systems.
Speaker: Adam Heathcote is the Senior Director of the Department of Water and Climate Change at the Science Museum of Minnesota and oversees the St. Croix Watershed Research Station, a member of the Organization of Biological Field Stations with a speciality in radiometric dating and paleolimnology. Heathcote received his PhD from Iowa State University and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Group de Recherche Interuniversitaire en Limnologie at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He is a limnologist and biogeochemist whose work focuses on the impact of humans on aquatic ecosystems from both contemporary and paleo-limnological perspectives. He is also a Fellow and was elected to the Board of Directors for the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography.
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IGB strives to facilitate and accelerate the exchange of knowledge and ideas within and also outside of IGB. One element contributing to inter- and transdisciplinary exchange, and more (scientific) cooperation and innovation, is to open up IGB Colloquia to an interested external audience from science (other research institutes, universities, laboratories) as well as practice (i.e. conservationists, freshwater/land-use managers, authorities, associations). If you would like to join this IGB Colloquium as a guest, we ask you to register until the morning of the colloquium 10 o'clock the latest. After we have checked your registration, you will receive the participation link.
