B. B. Cael, David Seekell

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.