Major changes in fish thermal habitat diversity in Canada's Arctic lakes due to climate change ...

• Main Authors: Gillis, Daniel, Minns, Charles, Campana, Steven, Shuter, Brian
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Zenodo 2024
• Subjects: Arctic; Lakes; water temperature; lake stratification; Ice Phenology; Climate change; Fish habitat; Thermal Ecology; Thermal Guild; modelling; Impact Lake
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10537207; https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.10537207

Climate warming is a major disruptor of fish community structure globally. We use large-scale geospatial analyses of 447,077 Canadian Arctic lakes to predict how climate change would impact lake thermal habitat diversity across the Arctic landscape. Increases in maximum surface temperature (+2.4–6.7 °C), ice-free period (+14–38 days), and thermal stratification presence (+4.2–18.9%) occur under all climate scenarios. Lakes, currently fishless due to deep winter ice, open up; many thermally uniform lakes become thermally diverse. Resilient coldwater habitat supply is predicted; however, thermally diverse lakes shift from providing almost exclusively coldwater habitat to providing substantial coolwater habitat and previously absent warmwater habitat. Across terrestrial ecozones, most lakes exhibit major shifts in thermal habitat. The prevalence of thermally diverse lakes more than doubles, providing refuge for coldwater taxa. Ecozone-specific differences in the distribution of thermally diverse and thermally ... : Spreadsheet editor to view files (e.g., Microsoft Excel). R to execute code. Funding provided by: Natural Sciences and Engineering Research CouncilCrossref Funder Registry ID: https://ror.org/01h531d29Award Number: ...