Objective
Lakes close to cities are very important for water supply, amenity and recreation but have often been polluted by sewage effluent and agricultural run-off. Many are shallow and formerly had clear water and extensive communities of water plants but now have turbid water, unsightly and eroded edges and low diversity fish communities. Such eutrophication problems have been long recognised and advances have been made through control of external loadings of phosphorus. But in general nutrient control has failed in the restoration of shallow lakes. This is partly because clear water and turbid water states can exist in shallow lakes over similar and wide nutrient ranges as alternative stable states. Restoration of such lake to clear water requires understanding of the buffer mechanisms by which the states persist and the mechanisms by which switches between them may be made. Many of these mechanisms are climate sensitive. Nonetheless they offer through modification of the fish community, an opportunity for successful and inexpensive restoration at a cost affordable by local communities.
This proposal studies the functioning of shallow lake ecosystems along a climatic gradient from warm temperate Spain to sub-Arctic Finland, through the maritime and continental cold-temperate intermediates of the UK and Netherlands and Sweden. We will take a similar shallow lake in each country and conduct a common experiment in replicated mesocosms on each, concerned with how they react to combinations of nutrient loading and fish predation. We will thus be able to assess the effects of different climates and to predict what the implications of the current warming trend might be on lake restoration programmes. Such a trans-national experiment has not been conducted before and is very much in the spirit of the European Union as well as being of considerable fundamental and applied interest.
We shall also continue to maintain observations on established whole-lake biomanipulation experiments and shall carry out detailed work on particular processes important in the operation of the alternative stable states model for shallow lakes. These will include:
a) studies on the role of plant associated Cladocera as opposed to open water Cladocera such as Daphnia as grazers of phytoplankton together with investigations on the movement of predatory fish between the plant beds and the open water;
b) studies of the potential risk of mobilisation of heavy metals from the sediments following restoration of aquatic plants;
c) studies of the recruitment of cyanophytes and daphnids and the interaction between developing cyanophyte populations and daphnid grazers especially with reference to temperature;
d) studies on the release of nutrients within plant beds and the internal cycling through mineralisation of N and P between the plant beds and the open water;
e) studies of the role of fish and bird grazers on the stability of the plant populations.
We shall thus concentrate on processes concerned with inexpensive techniques so as to make our discoveries usable to as wide a range of communities as possible and will prepare a guide to the use of biomanipulative techniques for a non-scientific management audience as well as orthodox scientific paper based on the work.
KEYWORDS: Shallow lakes. Restoration. Fish. Climate. Eutrophication.Mesocosm. Alternative states.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences biological sciences biological behavioural sciences ethology biological interactions
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Coordinator
L69 3BX Liverpool
United Kingdom
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