SCIENCE AT THE EDGE SEMINAR

QB/GEDD

Friday, November 8 at 11:30am

Room 1400 Biomedical and Physical Sciences Bldg.

Refreshments at 11:15

Stephanie Hampton

National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis

 University of California, Santa Barbara

 

 

 

 

Deciphering Sixty Years of Environmental Data to Understand Recent Change in the World’s Largest Lake – Lake Baikal, Siberia

 

Lake Baikal is a lake often described in superlatives. It is the highest volume, oldest, and most biologically diverse freshwater lake, harboring many cold-adapted species that are found nowhere else. Russian-American collaboration has provided us with an unusual opportunity to examine the nature of Lake Baikal’s responses to both long-term warming trends and shorter term climate variability. Three generations of a single family of Siberian scientists have collected over 60 years of high-resolution data on plankton, temperature, and water clarity in Lake Baikal. Using time-series statistical approaches we have explored species interactions in the food web, as well as biotic relationships with temperature and a suite of climate indices that can proxy for large-scale atmospheric dynamics. A strong long-term warming trend over the past 60 years corresponds with compositional shifts in the plankton, as endemic cold-adapted taxa give way to cosmopolitan species associated with warmer temperatures. These long-term trends are embedded in shifting seasonality that correlates with large-scale climate indices encoding the dynamics of the jet stream as it moves across Siberia. Although Lake Baikal is a notorious ‘outlier’ in ecosystem comparisons, cross-system comparisons also reveal similarities with other large deep lakes that together help us understand past, present and future change for freshwater resources of the world.