National Geographic feature on climate change and European lakes

Lake Maggiore in Italy. Image: Alexander Vecchi, Wikipedia

The effects of climate change are already beginning to be seen on European lakes, according to new research.  As profiled in a recent National Geographic feature,  which references the MARS and REFRESH projects, Erik Jeppesen of Aarhus University, Denmark suggests that a warming and increasingly volatile climate is causing increasing algal blooms in European lakes, and fundamentally altering aquatic food webs, including the size and distribution of fish populations.

Jeppesen suggests that the ecological resilience of lake ecosystems can be increased through reducing the amount of nutrient pollution that is released into them, “The benefits are clear because of the synergistic effects between temperature and nutrient loading. Reducing the amount of nutrients available also increases the resilience of a lake to climate change.”  

You can read the full feature on the National Geographic website here, and read Jeppesen’s (2014) article in the Journal of Limnology here.