Quantifying the impact of anthropogenic nutrient imbalance on C flux from freshwater lakes: cellular mechanisms, community assembly and modelling

Freshwater lakes are amongst the largest ecosystems on Earth, and a major contributor to both carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) emissions, two potent greenhouse gases.

The use of nitrogen-rich fertilisers and their runoff as a result of human population growth are major contributors to the growing imbalance of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) in freshwater lakes.

These key nutrients limit the growth of algae, the energy available to support aquatic wildlife, and greenhouse gas release from this ecologically important ecosystem at a global scale.

The much faster increase of anthropogenic nitrogen runoff has dwarfed the input of phosphorus and shifted the balance of the global N:P ratio from 19:1 to 30:1 in the past four decades, driving more and more lake ecosystems towards being limited by the availability of phosphorus.

Although this trend is likely to continue, our knowledge of how this will affect the movement of CO2 and CH4 within freshwater ecosystems, and between these ecosystems and the atmosphere, remains uncertain.

Capitalising on our recent discovery that a low availability of P appears to reduce the capacity of both cyanobacteria (sometimes called "blue-green algae") to process CO2 and methanotrophs (a group of bacteria) to process CH4, we propose to uncover how N:P imbalance affects freshwater microbial communities and greenhouse gas emissions in freshwater lakes; effects that have major implications for global climate change.