Scaling relationships for whole-lake primary production

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint.

Add a Comment

You must log in to post a comment.


Comments

There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article.

Downloads

Download Preprint

Authors

B. B. Cael, David Seekell

Abstract

Scaling relationships provide simple rules for understanding complex ecological patterns. We evaluated scaling relationships between whole-lake (benthic + pelagic) primary production and the surface areas and volumes of 73 lakes. Whole-lake primary production scales isometrically with surface area, after accounting for latitudinal gradients of temperature and insolation. Whole-lake primary production scales to the ¾-power of lake volume, a pattern analogous to Kleiber’s Law for organismal metabolism except that its emergence is attributable to fractal characteristics of lake morphometry rather than optimal resource distribution networks. By applying our scaling relationships to a global lake database, we estimated that global lake primary production is 520 (±70) Tg C y-1. We also apply the scaling relationships to make predictions about other global lake characteristics including trophic structure and carbon cycling.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31223/X54D0S

Subjects

Environmental Sciences

Keywords

Dates

Published: 2022-03-09 08:10

Last Updated: 2022-03-09 16:10

License

CC BY Attribution 4.0 International

Additional Metadata

Data Availability (Reason not available):
Data are available from sources cited in the text.