Research project The project aims to leverage long-term Fennoscandian datasets to assess trends in lake food webs across pelagic and benthic habitats, including phytoplankton, zooplankton, benthic invertebrates, and fish.
Northern lakes in Fennoscandia are changing rapidly due to climate change, recovery from acidification and browner water. This affects nutrient availability and ecosystem balance, but we still know little about how these changes are linked. The project will use long-term data, satellites and AI to understand how the food webs of lakes are developing and to identify lakes at risk of rapid, critical shifts.
Dag Hessen, Oslo University, Norway
Irena Creed, University of Toronto
Stina Drakare, SLU, Uppsala
Tobias Vrede, SLU, Uppsala
Danny Lau, SLU, Uppsala
Kerstin Holmgren, SLU
Jussi Vuorenmaa, SYKE, Finland
Kriistina Vuorio, SYKE, Finland
Kimmo Kahilainen, Helsinki University
Peter Isles, Vermont Agency of Natural Resources
Northern lakes in Fennoscandia have been the focus of extensive long-term monitoring, generating unique high-quality datasets that capture environmental changes and their impacts on aquatic ecosystems. Key drivers of change include climate warming, acidification recovery, terrestrial greening (or browning) which are linked to variations in nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and calcium (Ca) loadings to lakes and dissolved organic carbon (DOC)-induced lake browning. Individually and collectively, these changes are reshaping northern lakes into new ecological states. Our understanding of the interactive effects of these changes on lake productivity and food webs remains limited.
This project aims to leverage these long-term datasets to assess trends in lake food webs across pelagic and benthic habitats, including phytoplankton, zooplankton, benthic invertebrates, and fish.
By integrating long-term in situ lake- and satellite-based monitoring with advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, we will improve predictions of future ecological trajectories and identify lakes at risk of crossing critical ecosystem thresholds, points of abrupt change in an ecosystem's structure, function, or stability, beyond which a small change in environmental conditions leads to disproportionate and often irreversible shifts in an ecosystem. This interdisciplinary approach will enhance our ability to predict and mitigate ecosystem changes, supporting sustainable lake management in the region.
