Tim Kratz Trout Lake Station, Center for Limnology University of Wisconsin-Madison Boulder Junction, WI 54568 tkkratz@wisc.edu (715) 356-9494
Craig E. Williamson Department of Zoology Miami University Oxford, Ohio 45056 craig.williamson@muohio.edu 513-529-3180
Surface waters ranging from headwater springs and wetlands, to lakes, rivers and estuaries serve as the key integrators of environmental and ecological disturbances across both local and continental landscapes. For example, municipal outflows or landfill sites lower the water quality and biodiversity of nearby streams and lakes; and fertilizers from farms in northern states drain cross-country and create fishless “dead zones” in lakes (e.g. Lake Erie) and coastal regions such as the Gulf of Mexico. As a consequence, research on water (including the biota, ranging from microbes to humans, that depend on water) and related policy and socio-economic issues is growing in importance and necessity throughout the world - this “water crisis” will affect each and every person during this century, mostly from the overuse and misuse of these resources. The future viability of our drainage basins and their ability to support human societies depends on an understanding of the physical, chemical, and biological processes that affect water quality and related ecosystem services.
Despite these imperative continental needs, there is no national network of ecological observations made with appropriate techniques that can assess the current health of aquatic ecosystems, predict future changes, or prescribe a science-based rationale for sustaining the critical services provided by lakes, streams, wetlands, and reservoirs. The NEON program will create this network, and in this document we provide a scientific framework linking terrestrial and aquatic studies at different scales, and give examples of key research questions and the infrastructure required to answer them. Although aquatic resources are derived from all water bodies, in this RFI we focus on a proposed observing network of lakes and reservoirs, and describe links to related proposals and ongoing projects representing flowing waters, wetlands, and estuaries. Overall, the role of surface waters as both sentinels of ecological vitality and integrators of landscape processes is a cornerstone of any design for a national agenda on observing environmental health and change.
Our overarching question is: How do changes in climate, land-use, and invasive species alter lake metabolism and consequently ecosystem services through biogeochemical, biodiversity, and hydroecological responses?
Three specific hypotheses are:
We propose a NEON focus on lake metabolism as the integrated response variable for long-term ecosystem change that involves complex interactions among biogeochemistry, biodiversity, and hydroecology. The proposed continental-scale network of instrumented lakes will be arrayed along gradients of climate, land use, and N-deposition and consist of up to 67 sites identified by the Consortium for Connectivity at Continental Scales (3CS) working group. As such, the network will be closely integrated with the four continental-scale themes identified by 3CS.
To our knowledge, the proposed network of instrumented lakes and reservoirs will be the largest and most tightly integrated aquatic network ever deployed.