Smoke from regional wildfires alters lake ecology.

Wildfire smoke often covers areas larger than the burned area, yet the impacts of smoke on nearby aquatic ecosystems are understudied. In the summer of 2018, wildfire smoke covered Castle Lake (California, USA) for 55 days. We quantified the influence of smoke on the lake by comparing the physics, chemistry, productivity, and animal ecology in the prior four years (2014-2017) to the smoke year (2018).

Ecosystem response to earlier ice break-up date: Climate-driven changes to water temperature, lake-habitat-specific production, and trout habitat and resource use.

Climate warming has yielded earlier ice break-up dates in recent decades for lakes leading to water temperature increases, altered habitat, and both increases and decreases to ecosystem productivity. Within lakes, the effect of climate warming on secondary production in littoral and pelagic habitats remains unclear. The intersection of changing habitat productivity and warming water temperatures on salmonids is important for understanding how climate warming will impact mountain ecosystems.