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Local environment overrides regional climate influence on regime shift in a north temperate lake

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Abstract

Regime shifts in shallow lakes are typically characterized by submerged macrophyte (clear water regime) or phytoplankton (turbid regime) dominance. Climate warming is expected to affect water quality and facilitate turbidity in lakes, but we may also expect synergistic effects on organisms’ interactions from climate and local specific dynamics in lakes. We here examined long-term changes in phytoplankton composition in July and August from 1980 to 2011 in a temperate shallow lake, Lake Krankesjön, a dataset including 21 years throughout a 31-year period. We hypothesize that although effects of the ongoing climate change are visible in our long-term data set, local specific dynamics override climate effects. We found that cyanophytes were the most abundant phytoplankton taxa among which small-sized colonial cyanobacteria were dominant. Both population density of small-sized colonial cyanobacteria and maximum water temperature increased over the period of study. However, the variations in the phytoplankton assembly were likely mainly related to three principal factors, including the local availability of nutrients, grazing from zooplankton, and possibly, an increasing trend in temperature. The first two factors are associated with the local specific dynamics, while the last with regional climate. Our long-term study showed that although there were potential climate warming effects on the phytoplankton community, local factors, such as biotic interactions and nutrient availability, were likely stronger drivers than climate warming in Lake Krankesjön at least over the last 30-year period.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to all staff from Aquatic Ecology unit at Lund University for collecting the samples during the long-term monitoring programme. We thank Susanne Gustafsson for her help on the phytoplankton identification. The study was financed by the Swedish Research Council FORMAS, the Swedish Research Council (VR), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 31200359 to MZ and Grant Nos. 31170439 and 31370473 to JX), and Special Fund for Agro-scientific Research in the Public Interest Project (201203083).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Fisheries, Freshwater Aquaculture Collaborative Innovation Center of Hubei Province, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, 430070, People’s Republic of China

    Min Zhang

  2. Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, 430072, People’s Republic of China

    Jun Xu

  3. Institute of Biology/Aquatic Ecology, Ecology Building, Lund University, 22362, Lund, Sweden

    Lars-Anders Hansson

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  1. Min Zhang
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  2. Jun Xu
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  3. Lars-Anders Hansson
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Correspondence to Jun Xu.

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Handling Editor: Bas W. Ibelings.

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Zhang, M., Xu, J. & Hansson, LA. Local environment overrides regional climate influence on regime shift in a north temperate lake. Aquat Ecol 49, 105–113 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10452-015-9509-4

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