Identifying the scaling rules describing ecological patterns across time and space is a central challenge in ecology. Taylor's law of fluctuation scaling, which states that the variance of a population's size or density is proportional to a positive power of the mean size or density, has been widely observed in population dynamics and characterizes variability in multiple scientific domains. However, it is unclear if this phen...

Climate change has myriad impacts on ecosystems, but the mechanisms by which it affects individual species can be difficult to pinpoint. One strategy to discover such mechanisms is to identify a specific ecological factor related to survival or reproduction and determine how that factor is affected by climate. Here we used Landsat imagery to calculate water clarity for 127 lakes in northern Wisconsin from 1995 to 2021 and thus...

Depth regulates many attributes of aquatic ecosystems, but relatively few lakes are measured, and existing datasets are biased toward large lakes. To address this, we used a large dataset of maximum ( Z max ; n = 16,831) and mean ( Z mean ; n = 5,881) depth observations to create new depth models, focusing on lakes Z max ; root mean square error [RMSE] = 8.0 m and Z mean ; RMSE = 3.0 m). Our models show that lake depth followe...