Management of Climatic Extreme Events in Lakes and Reservoirs for the Protection of Ecosystem Services (MANTEL)

Long-term changes in lakes are often of a non-linear nature, surpassing critical thresholds and leaving systems in a different state often with temperature as a main forcing for a cascade of abrupt environmental changes. We know little about the temporal scales we need to consider for detecting and predicting change in resilience and how extreme events contribute to long term trends and variability in ecosystem functionality. We will study the effects of episodic events on algal mass and lake metabolism as a proxy of ecosystem functionality, using the Metabolic Theory of Ecology  as a universal concept. High taxonomic resolution records will allow us to study the role of episodic events in the context of known long-term trends (30+ years) and short term recovery- and link overlapping effects of climate and other anthropogenic induced responses to overall ecosystem functionality.

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