Predicting Future Temperature and Oxygen Conditions in 2,500 Wisconsin Managed Lakes

Across Wisconsin, there are almost 2,500 individual lakes with managed fisheries that encompass a broad range of physical and biological characteristics such as clarity, lake size, wind sheltering and depth. These lake-specific characteristics interact in a complex way to determine how water column temperatures are influenced by climate. Effective management of lakes requires an understanding of how individual lakes will respond differently to changing climatic conditions. However, such understanding is hampered by a lack of direct observations and a lake-specific approach that can create actionable predictions of response to climate change for individual lakes.

To fill the gap between knowledge and need, we built a mechanistic, open-source lake modeling framework which combines the best available meteorological data and relevant lake metadata to estimate past and future projected water temperature and oxygen conditions across 2,500 managed lakes. Our results show that water column temperature response to climate change has weak spatial coherence, resulting in neighboring lakes with potentially different fisheries outcomes under projected future climate scenarios. This heterogeneity is a result of the complex interaction of lake-specific characteristics, highlighting the need for lake-specific information on response to climate change.