The hydrology of shallow lakes (and ponds) located in the western Hudson Bay Lowlands (HBL) is sensitive to climate warming and associated permafrost thaw. However, their biological characteristics are poorly known, which hampers effective aquatic ecosystem monitoring. Located in northern Manitoba along the southwestern coast of Hudson Bay, Wapusk National Park (WNP) encompasses numerous shallo...

1. Invasions of zebra and quagga mussels have had long-term, large-scale impacts on lake ecosystems in the USA as characterised by high abundance, broad-scale spread and effective adaption to new environmental conditions. Due to their high filtering capacity, decreases in chlorophyll a (Chl) and total phosphorus (TP) concentrations have been reported in many affected lakes. 2. In 25 US lakes, w...

This introductory chapter to the book “Tropical eutrophic lakes: their restoration and management” gives a summary survey of the responses of temperate lakes to increased nutrient loading (the eutrophication process) and during remediation. Chemically and biologically conditioned resistance may cause a delayed response to the nutrient loading reduction and different methods of overcoming this r...

The Aquatic Macrophyte Community Index (AMCI) is a multipurpose tool developed to assess the biological quality of aquatic plant communities in lakes. It can be used to specifically analyze aquatic plant communities or as part of a multimetric system to assess overall lake quality for regulatory, planning, management, educational, or research purposes. The components of the index are maximum de...

Lakes in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River form a shallow lake group unique in the World that is becoming increasingly polluted by heavy metals. Previous studies have largely focused on individual lakes, with limited exploration of the regional pattern of heavy metal pollution of the lake group in this area. This paper explores the sources, intensity and spatial patterns of heav...

Large uncertainties in the budget of atmospheric methane (CH4) limit the accuracy of climate change projections. Here we describe and quantify an important source of CH4 -- point-source ebullition (bubbling) from northern lakes -- that has not been incorporated in previous regional or global methane budgets. Employing a method recently introduced to measure ebullition more accurately by taking ...

AUGUST 2004 AMERICAN METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY | T he Laurentian Great Lakes (Fig. 1) comprise the United States’ premier surfacewater resource, with a basin area of 770,000 km2 (Coordinating Committee on Great Lakes Basic Hydraulic and Hydrologic Data 1977). The lakes cover an area of over 245,000 km2 and contain approximately 23,000 km3 of water. They contain about 18% of the world’s freshwater ...

Soda lakes are intriguing ecosystems harboring extremely productive microbial communities in spite of their extreme environmental conditions. This makes them valuable model systems for studying the connection between community structure and abiotic parameters such as pH and salinity. For the first time, we apply high-throughput sequencing to accurately estimate phylogenetic richness and composi...

The European zebra mussel, Dreissena polymorpha (Pallas), has recently been introduced to North American freshwaters. Dreissena exhibits a wide range of population dynamics among different European lakes. In some lakes, long-term population size is fairly constant, while populations in other lakes can fluctuate greatly from year to year. Assessments of the potential ecological and economic effe...

Biogeochemical processes are driven jointly by mass flux and metabolism, but biogeochemical contrasts across latitude are more strongly related to metabolism than to mass flux. Metabolism can be expressed in terms of metabolic potential, which is regulated by temperature, irradiance, and chemical feedstocks (nutrients, electron acceptors, organic matter). Metabolic potential of autotrophs in tr...