Loch Leven

Scientific challenge

Detailed, long-term monitoring of lakes that are subject to multiple environmental, climatic and human pressures is essential to enable us to understand how lake ecosystems respond to change. These results provide the scientific evidence needed to inform decisions on lake restoration activities, and their sustainable management, worldwide.

Project summary

Loch Leven has been monitored regularly since 1968. Current monitoring involves sampling every two weeks, all year, using standard methodologies. The results of this work have provided a research platform for many shorter term collaborative research projects, such as palaeolimnological assessments  , investigations into climate change impacts and studies of macronutrient cycling. When additional sources of data are included, the Loch Leven data set spans more than 150 years. Monitoring covers a wide range of variables including hydrology, chemistry, physics, macrophytes, algae, zooplankton, macroinvertebrates, fish and wildfowl.

Loch Leven is world famous for its wild brown trout fishery and internationally recognised as an important area of conservation. The main recreational activities on and around the loch include walking, cycling, angling and bird watching. However, the  water quality of the loch is affected by pollutants, especially phosphorus, that enter the lake from its catchment. The main sources of these are agricultural runoff and wastewater discharges.

Phosphorus concentrations in the loch have decreased dramatically since the mid 1990s, when discharges from wastewater treatment plants and an industrial sources  were reduced. Data collected by UKCEH, NatureScot, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency and the River Leven Trustees show the impact of this on the loch’s water quality and biodiversity. These data, which span five trophic levels in the loch – from algae to fish and aquatic birds - are of significant national and international importance. They are used widely by the international research community to study lake eutrophication and recovery processes, and for research into the effects of changes in climate, land use and other human pressures.

See the data

We have created a Loch Leven data portal to visualise the long-term monitoring data alongside more recently collected yearly data.

Objectives

The Loch Leven project requires routine activities to maintain consistent annual delivery of operations and long-term development to enhance the provision of data products. The following objectives span both types of activity over the 5-year duration of the NC-UK programme:

• To maintain the long-term (> 57 years) monitoring of key chemical, physical and biological variables at Loch Leven
• To publish annual data summaries on the NERC Environmental Information Data Centre
• To use these data to underpin research by UKCEH and others on key environmental issues such as lake eutrophication and restoration, catchment management and the impacts of environmental change on biodiversity, ecosystem service delivery and resilience
• To support research into the effects of changes in connectivity on freshwater ecosystem structure and function
• To aid national to global scale assessments of the state of lakes and their response to climatic and other drivers of change
• To validate data from a range of sources including earth observation, citizen science and automatic sensors
• To support lake model development and the testing of management scenarios

Data portal

Loch Leven Portal

Data

The Loch Leven project will produce a number of open access datasets during the programme. These are located on the EIDC. Examples include:

• Loch Leven monitoring data (water quality, chemistry, crustacean zooplankton), 2019
• Loch Leven monitoring data (water quality, chemistry, crustacean zooplankton), 2020
• Loch Leven monitoring data (water quality, chemistry, crustacean zooplankton), 2021
• Loch Leven monitoring data (water quality, chemistry, crustacean zooplankton), 2022
• Loch Leven monitoring data (water quality, chemistry, crustacean zooplankton), 2023

Interactions

UKCEH National Capability

• Outputs from this project link to other UKCEH National Capability projects, such as those focused on model integration, resilience to environmental change, lake restoration and natural capital/ecosystem service delivery.
• Loch Leven provides evidence to inform and support the sustainable restoration of impacted waters in developing countries (e.g. Kenya, India, Chile, China, Indonesia) through the UKCEH International Science for Net Zero+ programme.

Partnerships

• Loch Leven data currently support a range of existing collaborative projects within UKCEH (e.g. EU FutureLakes project; UKSA Aquawatch Project; several PhDs ) and feed into annual, global scale, 'State of the Climate' reports.
• Data are shared with a range of conservation bodies, regulatory agencies, the local council and members of the Loch Leven stakeholder partnership to support day-to-day decision making within Scotland. These stakeholders also share a considerable amount of their own data with this project, which adds value to the data collected routinely
• The River Leven Improvement Programme, which aims to improve the environment to reduce levels of deprivation in this ex-industrial landscape, includes Loch Leven. This is currently funded, collaboratively, by an ever increasing body of stakeholders, including SEPA, Fife Council, Sustrans, NatureScot, Scottish Water, Scottish Enterprise, Fife College, Forth Rivers Trust, Diageo, Central Scotland Green Network Trust and Keep Scotland Beautiful, providing a large and increasing user community for our data