BigOx: Understanding and predicting long-term oxygen decline in northern lakes using big data

Oxygen is essential for the health of lake ecosystems, but global climate warming may severely deplete oxygen concentrations by increasing microbial respiration rates and stifling atmospheric exchange.

My preliminary analysis of 1028 Swedish lakes reveals a significant decline in summer oxygen over the past 30-years, so that a majority of lakes now annually experience conditions lethal to most aquatic life (hypoxia). The cause and future trajectory of this trend are currently unknown.

This knowledge gap severely impedes future predictions of the impacts of climate change on freshwater ecosystem functioning. The goal of this 36-month project is to understand and predict ongoing oxygen depletion in northern lakes.

I will employ an innovative ‘big data’ approach that combines the first regional synthesis of lake oxygen measurements from national water quality databases including >1000 lakes (WP1: identify long-term trends and key environmental covariates of lake O2) and advanced high-frequency sensors in six lakes in Sweden and Canada (WP2: obtain a mechanistic understanding of temperature-oxygen relationships) into a new predictive framework of hypoxia designed to aid lake managers in risk assessment (WP3).

The novel integration of broad-scale statistical models and fine-scale empirical functions of lake oxygen dynamics utilizes my experience with high-frequency measurements and my host’s expertise in aquatic biogeochemistry and analysis of large environmental datasets.