1. Tuesday 🧵PART 2. Before we talk about #ClimateChange, we might have a look at what happens to all the #Carbon coming off the bogs and into the rivers and lakes, i.e. the transport of terrestrials stores of Carbon to the sea. This is a great infographic from the @c_cascades
2. Current estimates put this at about 5.1 Pg of C per year, although most people expect this to rise, considering the high uncertainty, ongoing anthropogenic impacts, and continual refinement of the science aslopubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/lo…
3. One of the parts of this carbon is Dissolved Organic Carbon (DOC) which is the brown colour that you see in bog streams – those of you with water supplies coming off bogs will be familiar with this kind of change
4. The peak in export of DOC from bogs in Ireland is in late summer / early autumn, and is fairly consistent across the sub-catchments of Burrishoole, being controlled by climate variables including temperature and rainfall bg.copernicus.org/articles/16/10…
5. Some of that terrestrial C sinks to the bottom of Feeagh, some gets exported downstream, some is emitted to the atmosphere as CO2 / CH4, and some is taken into the food web of the lake via plankton like these Plagioselmis (#heterotrophic #plankton)
6. We have a paper coming out shortly summarising this, which is pretty exciting – the first full carbon budget (that we know of) for an Irish lake This is work done with Brian Doyle as part of his PhD
7. One part of this #CarbonBudget for Lough Feeagh that we havent fully got to grips with is the amount of #Methane (CH4) that is coming off the lake. @mctrulson is addressing this through the @MANTEL_ITN project. Look at these bubbles of methane! (only visible on a calm day)
8. So why are we so interested in #CarbonBudgets? Because its like a spreadsheet that captures #ClimateChange and #Landusechange impacts on the whole aquatic ecosystem - a bit like doing your accounts every year and seeing if you are in the red or the black - sink or source
9. @EleanorJennin11 did the first modelling work on Feeagh and its catchments, and showed that we might expect an increase of 15- 35% increase in DOC input in the coming century as the climate warms (orange boxplots in bottom graph)
10.What other #ClimateChange impacts are we expecting? Thanks to the foresight of the original SRT biologists, we now have one of the longest in-situ water temperature datasets in the world
📷M. Dillane
11. This paper chart recorder has been measuring the surface water temperature of Feeagh since 1959, & we continue the measurement with a sensor. We know that the surface water of the lake is already warming quite considerably, especially in winter. 🥵(DOY is day of year)
12.Summer water temperatures are warming at a rate 0.2 degrees per decade, while winter temps are increasing at a rate of 0.3 degrees per decade
16. This has implications for how the lake functions. For example, we are starting to notice more #bluegreen algae then in previous years, which many people have linked with increasing water temperatures (although, as you expect, its probably more complicated than that ) 😉
13. In upstream Lough Bunaveela, increasing winter temperatures are concerning, as we have a precious population of #ArcticChar, a cold water fish restricted to about 20 lakes in Ireland. They only spawn successfully spawn in cold water @S_O_Ceallaigh link.springer.com/article/10.100…
14. Feeagh is also being affected by #ExtremeEvents including #heatwaves and heavy #rainfall events. Our routine monitoring, including the high resolution data collected by the AWQMS provides an invaluable set of data to quantity resilience to, and recovery from extreme events
15. In 2009, a localised rainfall event dumped 50 mm of rain on the east side of the catchment in 2 hours, an event that took the lake 6 months to recover from 😱 tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…
16. The west coast of Ireland is probably quite well buffered by the #AtlanticOcean against the harshest extremes of #ClimateChange but even so, we did not escape the heatwave of summer 2022, when we had unprecedented water temperatures in the surface waters of Feeagh
17. To wrap up, how can we move beyond locally valuable case studies, such as described today, toward greater understanding of the complex interactions between the ecological impacts of #ClimateChage and those of other human-caused stresses?
18. One way is to COLLABORATE! Lough Feeagh is one of the sentinel sites in the @GLEONetwork, a grassroots network of people interested in understanding, predicting and communicating the role and response of lakes in a changing global environment gleon.org
@GLEONetwork We have learnt so much from our interaction with @GLEONetwork and Feeagh data has been used in many super GLEON publications. Seeing a little dot on the west of Ireland, and knowing that our data is contributing to global scientific advancement is 👍👍
agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.10…
@GLEONetwork 19. OK, so tomorrow, we are going to talk about #Salmon, which I suspect is what most of you have been waiting for…......advance warning: its not good news🙁
Oíche mhaith👋
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.