Synergy between nutrients and warming enhances methane ebullition from experimental lakes

Thomas A. Davidson (), Joachim Audet, Erik Jeppesen, Frank Landkildehus, Torben L. Lauridsen, Martin Søndergaard and Jari Syväranta
Additional contact information
Thomas A. Davidson: Aarhus University
Joachim Audet: Aarhus University
Erik Jeppesen: Aarhus University
Frank Landkildehus: Aarhus University
Torben L. Lauridsen: Aarhus University
Martin Søndergaard: Aarhus University
Jari Syväranta: Aarhus University

Nature Climate Change, 2018, vol. 8, issue 2, 156-160

Abstract: Abstract Lakes and ponds are important natural sources of the potent greenhouse gas methane (CH4), with small shallow waters identified as particular hotspots1,2. Ebullition (bubbles) of CH4 makes up a large proportion of total CH4 flux3,4. However, difficulty measuring such episodic events 5 makes prediction of how ebullition responds to nutrient enrichment and rising temperatures challenging. Here, the world’s longest running, mesocosm-based, shallow lake climate change experiment was used to investigate how the combination of warming and eutrophication (that is, nutrient enrichment) affects CH4 ebullition. Eutrophication without heating increased the relative contribution of ebullition from 51% to 75%. More strikingly the combination of nutrient enrichment and experimental warming treatments of +2–3 °C and +4–5 °C had a synergistic effect, increasing mean annual ebullition by at least 1900 mg CH4-C m−2 yr−1. In contrast, diffusive flux showed no response to eutrophication and only a small increase at higher temperatures (average 63 mg CH4–C m−2 yr−1). As shallow lakes are the most common lake type globally, abundant in highly climate sensitive regions 6 and most vulnerable to eutrophication, these results suggest their current and future contributions to atmospheric CH4 concentrations may be significantly underestimated.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-017-0063-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcli:v:8:y:2018:i:2:d:10.1038_s41558-017-0063-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nclimate/

DOI: 10.1038/s41558-017-0063-z

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Climate Change is currently edited by Bronwyn Wake

More articles in Nature Climate Change from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().