Oxygen consumption in seasonally stratified lakes decreases only below a marginal phosphorus threshold

Abstract

Areal oxygen (O2) consumption in deeper layers of stratified lakes and reservoirs depends on the amount of settling organic matter. As phosphorus (P) limits primary production in most lakes, protective and remediation efforts often seek to reduce P input. However, lower P concentrations do not always lead to lower O2 consumption rates. This study used a large hydrochemical dataset to show that hypolimnetic O2 consumption rates in seasonally stratified European lakes remain consistently elevated within a narrow range (1.06 ± 0.08 g O2 m−2 d−1) as long as areal P supply (APS) exceeded 0.54 ± 0.06 g P m−2 during the productive season. APS consists of the sum of total P present in the productive top 15 m of the water column after winter mixing plus the load of total dissolved P imported during the stratified season, normalized to the lake area. Only when APS sank below this threshold, the areal hypolimnetic mineralization rate (AHM) decreased in proportion to APS. Sediment trap material showed increasing carbon:phosphorus (C:P) ratios in settling particulate matter when APS declined. This suggests that a decreasing P load results in lower P concentration but not necessarily in lower AHM rates because the phytoplankton community is able to maintain maximum biomass production by counteracting the decreasing P supply by a more efficient P utilization. In other words, in-lake organic matter production depends only on APS if the latter falls below the threshold of 0.54 g P m−2 and correspondingly, the atomic C:P ratio of the settling material exceeds ~155.