ArticleEcosystems (New York, N.Y.)2025
Fifty-Year Trends Reveal Reversal from Recovery to Re-eutrophication and Reinforced Anoxia in a Managed Mountain Lake.
Article in Ecosystems (New York, N.Y.), 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Anoxia in lakes has intensified in recent decades, threatening ecosystem functioning. Yet, the mechanisms driving long-term trends in anoxia intensity and duration are complex, especially in managed ecosystems, where field data are limited. Using a 50-year dataset from a lake affected by both eutrophication and restoration measures, we examined annual oxygen dynamics, assessing the effect of external drivers, such as climate warming and hypolimnetic withdrawal effectiveness, and of in-lake processes influencing anoxia. Breakpoint analysis revealed a major ecosystem regime shift around 1996, reversing the earlier recovery trend. Between 1972 and 1996, both the anoxic factor and hypolimnetic total phosphorus concentrations declined, but both rose significantly afterward, with phosphorus concentrations eventually exceeding pre-restoration levels, despite declining watershed inputs. This reversal coincided with a marked increase in thermal stratification duration, which likely intensified deoxygenation by limiting oxygen renewal in the hypolimnion. Our results also show that higher anoxia levels in 1 year significantly reinforced anoxia in the following year, suggesting a self-sustaining feedback mechanism. In addition, our results provide evidence that anaerobic mineralization is important to this feedback, accumulating reduced compounds that further enhance deoxygenation. Despite management efforts, the intensification of internal phosphorus loading and the accumulation of reduced substances have progressively diminished the effectiveness of the cost-effective hypolimnetic withdrawal system implemented since 1970. Our findings demonstrate how the emergence of reinforcing feedbacks, linking oxygen depletion, internal phosphorus release, and climate-driven stratification, can undermine traditional restoration strategies. This highlights the urgent need for adaptive management that explicitly addresses these interacting mechanisms among oxygen dynamics, nutrient cycling, and climate warming. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10021-025-01003-5.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.