• Energy Research

Lakes are fundamental to society and nature, yet they are currently exposed to excessive nutrients and climate change, resulting in algal blooms. In the future, this may change, but how and where still needs more scientific attention. Here, we explore future trends in algal blooms in lakes globally for >3500 'representative lakes' for the year 2050, considering the attribution of both nutrient and climate factors. We soft-coupled a process-based lake ecosystem model (PCLake+) with a watershed nutrient model (MARINA-Multi) to assess trends in algal blooms in terms of the Trophic State Index for chlorophyll-a (TSI-Chla). Globally between 2010 and 2050, we show a rising trend in algal blooms under fossil-fuelled development (TSI-Chla increase in 91 % of lakes) and a declining trend under sustainable development (TSI-Chla decrease in 63 % of lakes). These changes are significantly attributed to nutrients. While not always significant, climate change attributions point to being unfavourable for lakes in 2050, exacerbating lake water quality. Our study stresses prioritising responsible nutrient and climate management on policy agendas. This implies that the future of algal blooms in lakes is in our hands.

Lakes are fundamental to society and nature, yet they are currently exposed to excessive nutrients and climate change, resulting in algal blooms. In the future, this may change, but how and where still needs more scientific attention. Here, we explore future trends in algal blooms in lakes globally for >3500 'representative lakes' for the year 2050, considering the attribution of both nutrient and climate factors. We soft-coupled a process-based lake ecosystem model (PCLake+) with a watershed nutrient model (MARINA-Multi) to assess trends in algal blooms in terms of the Trophic State Index for chlorophyll-a (TSI-Chla). Globally between 2010 and 2050, we show a rising trend in algal blooms under fossil-fuelled development (TSI-Chla increase in 91 % of lakes) and a declining trend under sustainable development (TSI-Chla decrease in 63 % of lakes). These changes are significantly attributed to nutrients. While not always significant, climate change attributions point to being unfavourable for lakes in 2050, exacerbating lake water quality. Our study stresses prioritising responsible nutrient and climate management on policy agendas. This implies that the future of algal blooms in lakes is in our hands.

ABSTRACTFlux chamber methodologies are used at the global scale to measure the exchange of trace gases between terrestrial surfaces (soils) and the atmosphere. These methods evolved as a simplistic necessity to measure gas fluxes from a time when gas analysers were limited in capability and costs were prohibitively high, since which thousands of studies have deployed a wide variety of chamber methodologies to build vast datasets of soil fluxes. However, analytical limitations of the methods are often overlooked and are poorly understood by the flux community, leading to confusion and misreporting of observations in some cases. In recent years, the number of commercial suppliers of gas analysers claiming to be capable of measuring trace gas fluxes from chambers has drastically increased, with a myriad of analysers (and low‐cost sensors) now on offer with a wide variety of capabilities. While chamber designs and the capabilities of analysers vary by orders of magnitude, the rudimentary analytical uncertainties of individual flux measurements can still be standardised for direct comparison of methods. This study aims to serve as a guide to calculate the analytical uncertainty of chamber flux methodologies in a standardised way for direct comparisons. We provide comparisons of a variety of chamber measurement methodologies (closed static and dynamic chamber methods) to highlight the impact of analytical noise, chamber size, enclosure time and number of gas samples. With the associated tools, researchers, commercial suppliers and other stakeholders in the flux community can easily estimate the limitations of a particular methodology to establish and tailor the suitability of particular chambers and instruments to experimental requirements.

ABSTRACTFlux chamber methodologies are used at the global scale to measure the exchange of trace gases between terrestrial surfaces (soils) and the atmosphere. These methods evolved as a simplistic necessity to measure gas fluxes from a time when gas analysers were limited in capability and costs were prohibitively high, since which thousands of studies have deployed a wide variety of chamber methodologies to build vast datasets of soil fluxes. However, analytical limitations of the methods are often overlooked and are poorly understood by the flux community, leading to confusion and misreporting of observations in some cases. In recent years, the number of commercial suppliers of gas analysers claiming to be capable of measuring trace gas fluxes from chambers has drastically increased, with a myriad of analysers (and low‐cost sensors) now on offer with a wide variety of capabilities. While chamber designs and the capabilities of analysers vary by orders of magnitude, the rudimentary analytical uncertainties of individual flux measurements can still be standardised for direct comparison of methods. This study aims to serve as a guide to calculate the analytical uncertainty of chamber flux methodologies in a standardised way for direct comparisons. We provide comparisons of a variety of chamber measurement methodologies (closed static and dynamic chamber methods) to highlight the impact of analytical noise, chamber size, enclosure time and number of gas samples. With the associated tools, researchers, commercial suppliers and other stakeholders in the flux community can easily estimate the limitations of a particular methodology to establish and tailor the suitability of particular chambers and instruments to experimental requirements.

Empirical evidence demonstrates that lakes and reservoirs are warming across the globe. Consequently, there is an increased need to project future changes in lake thermal structure and resulting changes in lake biogeochemistry in order to plan for the likely impacts. Previous studies of the impacts of climate change on lakes have often relied on a single model forced with limited scenario-driven projections of future climate for a relatively small number of lakes. As a result, our understanding of the effects of climate change on lakes is fragmentary, based on scattered studies using different data sources and modelling protocols, and mainly focused on individual lakes or lake regions. This has precluded identification of the main impacts of climate change on lakes at global and regional scales and has likely contributed to the lack of lake water quality considerations in policy-relevant documents, such as the Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The Lake Sector of the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP) was founded for simulating climate change impacts on lakes using an ensemble of lake models and climate change scenarios. The protocol prescribes lake simulations driven by climate forcing from gridded observations and different Earth system models under various Representative Greenhouse Gas Concentration Pathways, all consistently bias-corrected on a 0.5° × 0.5° global grid. The ISIMIP Lake Sector is the largest international effort to project future water temperature, thermal structure, and ice phenology of lakes at local and global scales and paves the way for future simulations of the impacts of climate change on water quality and biogeochemistry in lakes. For a comprehensive description of ISIMIP, sectors, and protocols please see https://www.isimip.org/ In order to simulate the impacts of climate change on lakes worldwide, the ISIMIP3 Lake Sector protocol has defined a set of lakes to be modelled by all participating lake models, as well as the basic morphometry (i.e., hypsographic curves) information for each lake. This repository includes all calculations performed to obtain the final set of lake location and mosphometry inpput information for ISIMIP3 runs. For this, available datasets on global lake extension and morphometry were used first for selecting a set of representative lakes on Earth (~40000 lakes, one for each 0.5º pixel of the normalized input/putput grid for ISIMIP across sectors), and then morphological characteristics were assigned to each representative lake using a database on global lake morphology. The final set of files constitute the input data for lake morphology and location for ISIMIP3 Lake Sector runs, which are produced in netCDF format. {"references": ["https://www.hydrosheds.org/pages/hydrolakes", "https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms13603", "https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5243309.v1", "https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01132-9"]}

Empirical evidence demonstrates that lakes and reservoirs are warming across the globe. Consequently, there is an increased need to project future changes in lake thermal structure and resulting changes in lake biogeochemistry in order to plan for the likely impacts. Previous studies of the impacts of climate change on lakes have often relied on a single model forced with limited scenario-driven projections of future climate for a relatively small number of lakes. As a result, our understanding of the effects of climate change on lakes is fragmentary, based on scattered studies using different data sources and modelling protocols, and mainly focused on individual lakes or lake regions. This has precluded identification of the main impacts of climate change on lakes at global and regional scales and has likely contributed to the lack of lake water quality considerations in policy-relevant documents, such as the Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The Lake Sector of the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP) was founded for simulating climate change impacts on lakes using an ensemble of lake models and climate change scenarios. The protocol prescribes lake simulations driven by climate forcing from gridded observations and different Earth system models under various Representative Greenhouse Gas Concentration Pathways, all consistently bias-corrected on a 0.5° × 0.5° global grid. The ISIMIP Lake Sector is the largest international effort to project future water temperature, thermal structure, and ice phenology of lakes at local and global scales and paves the way for future simulations of the impacts of climate change on water quality and biogeochemistry in lakes. For a comprehensive description of ISIMIP, sectors, and protocols please see https://www.isimip.org/ In order to simulate the impacts of climate change on lakes worldwide, the ISIMIP3 Lake Sector protocol has defined a set of lakes to be modelled by all participating lake models, as well as the basic morphometry (i.e., hypsographic curves) information for each lake. This repository includes all calculations performed to obtain the final set of lake location and mosphometry inpput information for ISIMIP3 runs. For this, available datasets on global lake extension and morphometry were used first for selecting a set of representative lakes on Earth (~40000 lakes, one for each 0.5º pixel of the normalized input/putput grid for ISIMIP across sectors), and then morphological characteristics were assigned to each representative lake using a database on global lake morphology. The final set of files constitute the input data for lake morphology and location for ISIMIP3 Lake Sector runs, which are produced in netCDF format. {"references": ["https://www.hydrosheds.org/pages/hydrolakes", "https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms13603", "https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5243309.v1", "https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01132-9"]}

The csv file dataset_tigli_et_al_2024.csv contains the main results of Tigli et al. (2024). The file cotains the yearly mean chlorophyll-a concentration in mg/m3 for each representative lakes, as modelled by PCLake+, and the respective chla-TSI (1-100). The chlorophyll-a is provided for the baseline (hist) and for two future scenarios (ffd and sd), representitive of RCP8.5-SSP5 and RCP2.6-SSP1 respecrtively. The chlorophyll-a for each future scenario is showed as modelled with only the nutrients (N), only the climate (C) and both the nutrients and climate (C_and_N).The folder contains codebook_tigli_et_al_2024.csv for further description on the model outputs