TY - JOUR
T1 - Ecological resilience in tropical Andean lakes
T2 - A paleolimnological perspective
AU - Benito, Xavier
AU - Luethje, Melina
AU - Schneider, Tobias
AU - Fritz, Sherilyn C.
AU - Baker, Paul A.
AU - Pedersen, Eric J.
AU - Gaüzère, Pierre
AU - de Novaes Nascimento, Majoi
AU - Bush, Mark
AU - Ruhi, Albert
N1 - Funding Information:
We appreciate comments made by Neal Michelutti, David Hambright, and one anonymous reviewer that improve greatly the manuscript. We thank D.R. Engstrom, Science Museum of Minnesota, for analysis and interpretation of the 210Pb profiles on Pi?an and Yahuarcocha and Jason Curtis, University of Florida for the geochemical analyses on Pi?an and Yahuarcocha. Maria I Velez provided ?13C data for the Triunfo record. We are enormously indebted to all the contributors to the South American diatom database (https://github.com/xbenitogranell/diatoms-biogeography-southamerica), including M.L. Carrevedo, M.I. Velez, P. Tapia, M. Steinitz-Kannan, M. Bush, F. Mayle, and J.P. Bradbury. We also thank Gavin Simpson for his rich advice on the statistical methods applied here. We are grateful to Kewrin Choez and Maria Arteaga for fieldwork assistance in Imbabura province, Pablo Mosquera and Henni Hampel for help with Cajas National Park lakes limnology, and ETAPA EP rangers and Simon Quiroz for assistance during fieldwork. We also thank the Ministerio del Ambiente in Ecuador for permitting to conduct this research (151-2017-DPAA/MA and 008-IC-DPACH-MAE-2017). Funded by National Geographic 8672-09, NSF EAR-1338694, and NASA 15-BIODIV15-0013 grants to Sheri Fritz. Xavier Benito was supported by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) under funding received from the National Science Foundation DBI-1639145. Majoi Nascimento was supported by funding from NSF ICER 1624207 and the Belmont Foundation. Tobias Schneider was supported by SNSF early Postdoc. Mobility fellowship 184428. Albert Ruhi was supported by funds from the University of California, Berkeley and NSF #1802714.
Funding Information:
David Hambright, and one anonymous reviewer that improve greatly the manuscript. We thank D.R. Engstrom, Science Museum of Minnesota, for analysis and interpretation of the Pb profiles on Piñan and Yahuarcocha and Jason Curtis, University of Florida for the geochemical analyses on Piñan and Yahuarcocha. Maria I Velez provided δC data for the Triunfo record. We are enormously indebted to all the contributors to the South American diatom database ( https://github.com/xbenitogranell/diatoms-biogeography-southamerica ), including M.L. Carrevedo, M.I. Velez, P. Tapia, M. Steinitz‐Kannan, M. Bush, F. Mayle, and J.P. Bradbury. We also thank Gavin Simpson for his rich advice on the statistical methods applied here. We are grateful to Kewrin Choez and Maria Arteaga for fieldwork assistance in Imbabura province, Pablo Mosquera and Henni Hampel for help with Cajas National Park lakes limnology, and ETAPA EP rangers and Simon Quiroz for assistance during fieldwork. We also thank the Ministerio del Ambiente in Ecuador for permitting to conduct this research (151‐2017‐DPAA/MA and 008‐IC‐DPACH‐MAE‐2017). Funded by National Geographic 8672‐09, NSF EAR‐1338694, and NASA 15‐BIODIV15‐0013 grants to Sheri Fritz. Xavier Benito was supported by the National Socio‐Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) under funding received from the National Science Foundation DBI‐1639145. Majoi Nascimento was supported by funding from NSF ICER 1624207 and the Belmont Foundation. Tobias Schneider was supported by SNSF early Postdoc. Mobility fellowship 184428. Albert Ruhi was supported by funds from the University of California, Berkeley and NSF #1802714. 210 13
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography.
PY - 2022/2
Y1 - 2022/2
N2 - Little is known about whether changes in lake ecosystem structure over the past 150 years are unprecedented when considering longer timescales. Similarly, research linking environmental stressors to lake ecological resilience has traditionally focused on a few sentinel sites, hindering the study of spatially synchronous changes across large areas. Here, we studied signatures of paleolimnological resilience by tracking change in diatom community composition over the last 2000 years in four Ecuadorian Andean lakes with contrasting ecoregions. We focused on climate and anthropogenic change, and the type of biological responses that these changes induced: gradual, elastic, or threshold. We combined multivariate ordination techniques with nonlinear time-series methods (hierarchical generalized additive models) to characterize trajectories of community responses in each lake, and coherence in such trajectories across lakes. We hypothesized that remote, high-elevation lakes would exhibit synchronous trends due to their shared climatic constraints, whereas lower elevation lakes would show less synchronous trends as a consequence of human density and land-cover alteration. We found that gradual and elastic responses dominated. Threshold-type responses, or regime shifts, were only detected in the less remote lake, after a long period of gradual and elastic changes. Unexpected synchrony was observed in diatom assemblages from geographically distant and human-impacted lakes, whereas lakes under similar broad-scale environmental factors (climate and ecoregion) showed asynchronous community trajectories over time. Our results reveal a complex ecological history and indicate that Andean lakes in Ecuador can gradually adapt and recover from a myriad of disturbances, exhibiting resilience over century to millennial timescales.
AB - Little is known about whether changes in lake ecosystem structure over the past 150 years are unprecedented when considering longer timescales. Similarly, research linking environmental stressors to lake ecological resilience has traditionally focused on a few sentinel sites, hindering the study of spatially synchronous changes across large areas. Here, we studied signatures of paleolimnological resilience by tracking change in diatom community composition over the last 2000 years in four Ecuadorian Andean lakes with contrasting ecoregions. We focused on climate and anthropogenic change, and the type of biological responses that these changes induced: gradual, elastic, or threshold. We combined multivariate ordination techniques with nonlinear time-series methods (hierarchical generalized additive models) to characterize trajectories of community responses in each lake, and coherence in such trajectories across lakes. We hypothesized that remote, high-elevation lakes would exhibit synchronous trends due to their shared climatic constraints, whereas lower elevation lakes would show less synchronous trends as a consequence of human density and land-cover alteration. We found that gradual and elastic responses dominated. Threshold-type responses, or regime shifts, were only detected in the less remote lake, after a long period of gradual and elastic changes. Unexpected synchrony was observed in diatom assemblages from geographically distant and human-impacted lakes, whereas lakes under similar broad-scale environmental factors (climate and ecoregion) showed asynchronous community trajectories over time. Our results reveal a complex ecological history and indicate that Andean lakes in Ecuador can gradually adapt and recover from a myriad of disturbances, exhibiting resilience over century to millennial timescales.
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U2 - 10.1002/lno.11747
DO - 10.1002/lno.11747
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85104123020
VL - 67
SP - S23-S37
JO - Limnology and Oceanography
JF - Limnology and Oceanography
SN - 0024-3590
IS - S1
ER -