Abstract
Lakes are disproportionately important ecosystems for humanity, containing 77% of the liquid surface freshwater on Earth and comprising key contributors to global biodiversity. With an ever-growing human demand for water and increasing climate uncertainty, there is pressing need for improved understanding of the underlying patterns of natural variability of water resources and consideration of their implications for water resource management and conservation. Here we use Bayesian harmonic regression models to characterise water level dynamics and study the influence of cyclic components in confounding estimation of long-term directional trends in water levels in natural Irish lakes. We found that the lakes were characterised by a common and well-defined annual seasonality and several inter-annual and inter-decadal cycles with strong transient behaviour over time. Importantly, failing to account for the longer-term cyclic components produced a significant overall underestimation of the trend effect. Our findings demonstrate the importance of contextualising lake water resource management to the specific physical setting of lakes.
Highlights
The global anthropogenisation of Earth’s biomes and the appropriation of its natural resources under increasing climate uncertainty are complex and novel environmental and socioeconomic challenges for society [1,2,3,4]
Our harmonic regression (HREG) models located consistently a very strong annual seasonal component in all lakes associated with extremely tight credible intervals (Table 2; S1 Table in Supporting Information)
Long-term periodicities for those lakes best described by models with two- or three-harmonics frequently displayed multimodal posterior distributions (Fig. 1), resulting in mean estimates subject to strong uncertainty as indicated by their much wider credible intervals (Table 2). This is suggestive of dynamic cyclic behaviour
Summary
The global anthropogenisation of Earth’s biomes and the appropriation of its natural resources under increasing climate uncertainty are complex and novel environmental and socioeconomic challenges for society [1,2,3,4]. Water is recognised widely as the most essential of natural resources because of its importance to every facet of human life, limited supply and unequal distribution [5]. Sustainable use of global water resources is being hindered by the current intensification of the Earth’s water cycle with atmospheric warming [6]. Importance of Long-Term Cycles for Lake Water Level Dynamics Providing for PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0119253 March 10, 2015
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