Increasingly severe cyanobacterial blooms and deep water hypoxia coincide with warming water temperatures in reservoirs.

Abstract

Cyanobacterial blooms are expected to intensify and become more widespread with climate change and sustained nutrient pollution, subsequently increasing threats to lentic ecosystems, water quality, and human health. However, little is known about their rates of change because long-term monitoring data are rare, except for some well-studied individual lakes, which typically are large and broadly dispersed geographically. Using monitoring data spanning 1987-2018 for 20 temperate reservoirs located in the USA, we found that cyanobacteria cell densities mostly posed low-to-moderate human health risks until 2003-2005, after which cell densities rapidly increased. Increases were greatest in reservoirs with extensive agriculture in their watersheds, but even those with mostly forested watersheds experienced increases. Since 2009, cell densities posing high human health risks have become frequent with 75% of yearly observations exceeding 100,000cellsml-1 , including 53% of observations from reservoirs with mostly forested watersheds. These increases coincided with progressively earlier and longer summer warming of surface waters, evidence of earlier onset of stratification, lengthening durations of deep-water hypoxia, and warming deep waters in non-stratifying reservoirs. Among years, higher cell densities in stratifying reservoirs were associated with greater summer precipitation, warmer June surface water temperatures, and higher total Kjeldahl nitrogen concentrations. These trends are evidence that expected increases in cyanobacterial blooms already are occurring as changing climate conditions in some regions increasingly favor their proliferation. Consequently, their negative effects on ecosystems, human health, and socioeconomic wellbeing could increase and expand if warming trends and nutrient pollution continue.