Cumbrian lakes monitoring

Scientific challenge

Cumbria is home to the Lake District National Park, a World Heritage Site and one of the major lake districts in the UK. The lakes are a defining feature of the landscape, and provide recreational, aesthetic and cultural services that underpin a large tourist industry. Lake ecosystems are extremely sensitive to environmental stressors operating at global, regional and local scales and, as such, are important ‘sentinels’ of environmental change. Lakes are also excellent systems to develop and test ecological theories.

Project summary

The Cumbrian Lakes monitoring is currently undertaken by UKCEH, having been started by the Freshwater Biological Association (FBA) in 1945 and continued by UKCEH predecessor organisations since 1989. The long-term record for these lakes is the most comprehensive of any in the world. Currently, four lake basins (North and South basins of Windermere, Esthwaite Water, Blelham Tarn) are visited every fortnight and a range of physical, chemical and biological variables are recorded. These lakes also have automatic water quality monitoring stations that deliver high-resolution data on short term changes in the lake environment.

Specifically, we gather data on:

• Physical conditions: water temperature, transparency, above-water meteorology
• Chemical conditions: pH, alkalinity, concentrations of oxygen and nutrients (phosphorus, nitrogen and silica)
• Freshwater species: phyto- and zooplankton
• We adopt innovative monitoring approaches, to deliver new understanding of how these vital ecosystems are changing. Currently, we are building environmental DNA (eDNA) and plankton image analysis into our programme, to deliver new information on the biodiversity of these systems.

Only through regular monitoring can we distinguish day-to-day, month-to-month, and year-to-year variation from decadal-scale directional change, and provide insights into underlying causes. Our work on these lakes has allowed us to show how their physical, chemical and biological properties have changed over time, revealing clear long-term signals of warming, and the introduction of new species. This work also contributes to global climate change assessments, and international collaborations on lake ecology which have allowed us to examine the drivers of change in oxygen conditions in lakes, the impacts of storms on freshwater ecosystems, and drivers of algal growth and plankton biodiversity. We have engaged local communities with these data, for example through the annual Cumbrian Lakes Research Forum, to inform on the changing state of the lakes. Our data were used by partners in the Love Windermere Partnership to develop their Changing Windermere Report and contributed to the science underpinning the the EU Water Framework Directive, the legal framework for the management of European lakes.

Objectives

• To detect and attribute the consequences of environmental change for the structure, function and Natural Capital of lakes at a regional scale, by integrating unparalleled multi-decadal manual measurements and cutting-edge high-frequency monitoring
• To develop process-based understanding that, with models, earth observation and national datasets, can be up-scaled to forecast lake state, remediation and degradation nationally
• To collect and share high-quality lake ecosystem data with the international freshwater research community, and lead/participate in global scale studies of long-term and episodic change in aquatic ecosystems.

Data

Data collected from the Cumbrian lakes are available via the Environmental Information Data Centre, and support the UK Lakes Portal.

Research Facilities

• Three automatic water quality monitoring stations making four-minutely measurements of meteorological conditions, surface temperature, oxygen, pH, conductivity, chlorophyll concentrations and cyanobacteria abundance and, depth-profiles of temperature. Data telemetered automatically to a database
• Limnological field equipment, including a remotely operated vehicle and hydroacoustic survey equipment used to study fish spawning habitats and populations
• Research boats at each site, including the John Lund at Windermere (right)

Interactions

UKCEH National Capability

• Data from the Cumbrian Lakes were used by UKCEH data scientists to develop state-tagging/Quality Assurance approaches, which could then be applied to data across the National Capability programme.
• A current research project within NC-UK is focused on integrating data from the Cumbrian Lakes with other data sources and models to construct a digital twin which will allow us to develop understanding of water quality and forecast future change.

UKCEH co-aligned research

• Our long-term research activity on the Cumbrian Lakes has produced data that have been used in major EU projects, such as MARS and REFRESH, and more recently PLURALAKES.
• The Cumbrian Lakes are an important source of water and sediments for experiments conducted at our Aquatic Mesocosm Facility.
• The UKCEH Aquatic Ecosystems Group are also responsible for the management of the long-running UK Upland Waters Monitoring Network, that includes two Lake District tarns, Scoat Tarn and Burnmoor Tarn, and the Loch Leven monitoring scheme.
• Though not formally part of the NC-UK programme, our data are used to validate and test the phytoplankton community model PROTECH.

Partnerships

• Our lake monitoring contributes to UKCEH’s strong international reputation and has facilitated collaboration in major national and international projects (e.g. WISER, REFRESH, MARS, GLEON, NETLAKE, GloboLakes, Hydroscape and GEISHA). This has led to collaborations with scientists from over 20 countries.
• We have used the monitoring platform and data in an annual Lake Ecology MSc module, which we taught in partnership with staff in the Lancaster Environment Centre.
• The monitoring sites are regularly used by PhD researchers recruited through several Doctoral Training Partnerships.
• We welcome the opportunity to collaborate and develop new partnerships. Please get in touch if you would like to work with the Cumbrian Lakes Monitoring Platform.