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Decreasing nitrogen loading and climate change promotes the occurrence of nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria in a restored city lake

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Abstract

External loading reduction has been implemented to improve water quality in China since the 2000s. To evaluate the effects of nutrient reduction on phytoplankton, long-term monitoring data for Lake Wuli from 1998 to 2017 were analyzed. After the restoration since 2003, nitrogen decreased significantly from 8 to 2 mg/l until 2008 and then remained stable until 2017, while total phosphorus declined progressively from 0.2 mg/l to approximately 0.08 mg/l during 2003 and 2017. Biological data indicated that phytoplankton biovolume decreased after restoration until 2010 and then increased slightly from 2010 to 2017, mainly due to increasing of cyanobacterial biovolume. The dominant taxa shifted from cryptophyta to cyanobacteria since 2009. The results of both nonmetric multidimensional scaling and random forest regression showed that changes in nutrients, especially decreases in nitrogen, were the main drivers for phytoplankton community variation and increasing of cyanobacterial biovolume to the total phytoplankton biovolume ratio in summer and autumn. In addition to nutrients reduction, climatic variables such as wind speed decrease also played vital roles in increasing of cyanobacterial dominance in Lake Wuli. Our study confirmed that phytoplankton community respond strongly to nitrogen reduction in the subtropics and that climate change mediates the response.

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Acknowledgements

The study was jointly supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. XDA23040201), the Major Science and Technology Program for Water Pollution Control and Treatment (Grant No. 2017ZX07203-004), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41621002), the Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences, CAS (Grant No. QYZDB-SSW-DQC016), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province, China (Grant No. BK20171517), and “One-Three-Five” Strategic Planning of Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. Y7SL061003). We would like to thank the Taihu Laboratory for Lake Ecosystem Research (TLLER) for providing long-term monitoring data on Lake Wuli. Phytoplankton data from 1998 to 2010 were provided by Dr. Yuwei Chen. We also appreciate Erik Jeppesen from Aarhus University for his helpful comments and suggestion on our manuscript and two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and constructive suggestions for this manuscript.

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  1. Taihu Lake Laboratory Ecosystem Research Station, State Key Laboratory of Lake Science and Environment, Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, 210008, China

    Jianming Deng, Xiangming Tang, Boqiang Qin, Guang Gao, Yunlin Zhang, Guangwei Zhu & Zhijun Gong

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  1. Jianming Deng
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Deng, J., Tang, X., Qin, B. et al. Decreasing nitrogen loading and climate change promotes the occurrence of nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria in a restored city lake. Hydrobiologia 847, 2963–2975 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-020-04299-7

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