Supplementary material from "Arctic warming drives striking twenty-first century ecosystem shifts in Great Slave Lake (Subarctic Canada), North America's deepest lake" ...

• Main Authors: Rühland, Kathleen M., Evans, Marlene, Smol, John P.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: The Royal Society 2023
• Subjects: Environmental Science; Ecology; FOS Biological sciences; Arctic; Great Slave Lake; Subarctic
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.6806567.v2; https://rs.figshare.com/collections/Supplementary_material_from_Arctic_warming_drives_striking_twenty-first_century_ecosystem_shifts_in_Great_Slave_Lake_Subarctic_Canada_North_America_s_deepest_lake_/6806567/2

Great Slave Lake (GSL), one of the world's largest and deepest lakes, has undergone an aquatic ecosystem transformation in response to twenty-first century accelerated Arctic warming that is unparalleled in at least the past two centuries. Algal remains from four high-resolution palaeolimnological records retrieved from the West Basin provide baseline limnological data that we compared to historical phycological surveys undertaken on GSL between the 1940s and 1990s. We document the rapid restructuring of algal community composition ca . 2000 CE that is consistent with recent increases in regional air temperature and declines in ice cover and wind speed, that collectively altered habitats for aquatic biota. This new limnological regime initiated the first observation of scaled chrysophytes and favoured the rapid proliferation of small planktonic cyclotelloid diatoms which replaced the long-established dominance of large filamentous Aulacoseira islandica in West Basin sedimentary records. Such abrupt ...