Harmful algal blooms (HABs) are common in many eutrophic lakes and frequently associated with nutrient excesses, warm waters, and calm conditions. While HABs can also occur in oligotrophic waterbodies, bloom‐stimulating factors remain elusive for these ecosystems. Here, using a high‐frequency sensor platform supported by hydrodynamic modeling, we document a clearly linked sequence of three hydrodynamic events that immediately...

Lakes are currently facing multiple anthropogenic stressors impacting their ecological communities. The best way to understand how these systems will be affected by the changing environment is by modeling community dynamics. Models of lake food webs have tended to focus on pelagic organisms and treat lakes as if they contain single, uniform communities. However, heterogeneity in environmental conditions and resource availabili...

The mechanisms by which invasive species negatively affect native species include competition, predation, and the introduction of novel pathogens. Moreover, if an invasive species is a competent disease reservoir, it may facilitate the long-term maintenance and spread of pathogens in ecological assemblages and drive the extinction of less tolerant or less resistant species. Disease-driven loss of biodiversity is exemplified by...

Single‐lake studies offer an opportunity for understanding, predicting, and mitigating local or regional threats to lake ecosystems. Our goal was to understand how concurrent environmental stressors such as climate change, eutrophication, and salinization affect long‐term lake water quality. We report epilimnetic changes in 18 water‐quality parameters collected at seven sites from 1980 to 2016 in Lake George, a large oligotrop...

Species’ distributions will respond to climate change based on the relationship between local demographic processes and climate and how this relationship varies based on range position. A rarely tested demographic prediction is that populations at the extremes of a species’ climate envelope (e.g., populations in areas with the highest mean annual temperature) will be most sensitive to local shifts in climate (i.e., warming). W...

Research suggests that a positive relationship exists between diversity and ecological function, yet the multi‐trophic effects of biodiversity remain poorly understood. The resource complementarity hypothesis suggests that increasing the trait diversity of resources provides a more complete diet for consumers, elevating consumer feeding rates. Whereas previous tests of this mechanism have measured trait diversity as the variat...