Temperate lakes are undergoing climate‐driven alterations in their thermal regimes, changing their ecology. Previous efforts to understand temperature changes have overlooked multi‐dimensional temperature dynamics, missing complex shifts at high spatiotemporal resolutions across landscapes. Here, we use simulated daily water temperature profiles from > 11,000 temperate lakes throughout the Midwestern United States to (1) quant...

Although seasonal patterns of ecosystem productivity have been extensively described and analyzed with respect to their primary forcings in terrestrial and marine systems, comparatively little is known about these same processes in rivers. However, it is now possible to perform a large‐scale synthesis on the patterns and drivers of river productivity regimes because of the recent sensor advances allowing for near‐continuous es...

Responses in lake temperatures to climate warming have primarily been characterized using seasonal metrics of surface‐water temperatures such as summertime or stratified period average temperatures. However, climate warming may not affect water temperatures equally across seasons or depths. We analyzed a long‐term dataset (1981–2015) of biweekly water temperature data in six temperate lakes in Wisconsin, U.S.A. to understand (...

Temperate lakes may contain both coolwater fish species such as walleye ( Sander vitreus ) and warmwater fish species such as largemouth bass ( Micropterus salmoides ). Recent declining walleye and increasing largemouth bass populations have raised questions regarding the future trajectories and management actions for these species. We developed a thermodynamic model of water temperatures driven by downscaled climate data and...

Winter conditions are rapidly changing in temperate ecosystems, particularly for those that experience periods of snow and ice cover. Relatively little is known of winter ecology in these systems, due to a historical research focus on summer ‘growing seasons’. We executed the first global quantitative synthesis on under‐ice lake ecology, including 36 abiotic and biotic variables from 42 research groups and 101 lakes, examining...

We used a mechanistic physical model to examine the effect of variability in dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentrations on the physical properties of small temperate lakes. The model was validated on eight small (6 × 10 −4 to 3.8 × 10 −2 km 2 ) lakes in Wisconsin and Michigan, with a standard error 2°C colder than the reduced scenario. We found a nonlinear relationship between DOC and temperature, with clearer (lower DOC) s...

Seasonal changes in rates of gross primary production (GPP), net ecosystem production (NEP), and respiration (R) were determined from frequent automated profiles of dissolved oxygen (DO) and temperature in a clear‐water polymictic lake. Metabolic rate calculations were made using a method that integrates rates across the entire depth profile and includes DO exchange between depth layers driven by mixed‐layer deepening and eddy...

Summary For lake microbes, water column mixing acts as a disturbance because it homogenizes thermal and chemical gradients known to define the distributions of microbial taxa. Our first objective was to isolate hypothesized drivers of lake bacterial response to water column mixing. To accomplish this, we designed an enclosure experiment with three treatments to independently test key biogeochemical changes induced by mixing: o...