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Climate change accelerates recovery of the Tatra Mountain lakes from acidification and increases their nutrient and chlorophyll a concentrations

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Abstract

We evaluated changes in the concentration of cations, anions, nutrients (dissolved organic carbon, DOC; phosphorus, P; and nitrogen forms including nitrate, NO3− and total organic nitrogen, TON), and chlorophyll a (Chl-a) in 31 Tatra Mountain lakes in Slovakia and Poland during their recovery from acidic deposition (1992–2018). Typical effects of decreasing acidic deposition on the lakes’ water composition, such as decreasing base cation concentrations, were confounded by climate change and catchment characteristics, including areal proportions of well-developed soils and scree. A climate-related increase in physical erosion provided freshly exposed unweathered granodiorite (the dominant bedrock) to chemical weathering. Dissolution of accessory calcite in the granodiorite increased the in-lake Ca2+ and HCO3− concentrations and reversed the Ca2+ trends, which originally decreased in parallel with strong acid anions. These changes were most pronounced in steep, scree-rich areas, which are most sensitive to physical weathering. Fresh apatite [Ca5(PO4)3(F, Cl, OH)] in the crushed granodiorite acts as a P source at soil pH’s between 4 and 5 and in the presence of chelating organic acids within soils. These conditions enhance apatite solubility, which in part explains increasing P in lakes with scree-dominated catchments. Soil recovery from acidification due to decreasing acidic deposition and the neutralizing effect of weathering of erosion-derived accessory calcite were the most likely causes of elevated DOC and P export from soils. Their elevated leaching was accompanied by increasing in-lake concentrations of Chl-a and TON. The increasing TON concentrations were, as for Ca2+, most pronounced in the scree-rich catchments, and represented the most sensitive indicator of the changes in the lake water nutrient composition.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic (project No. P503/17/15229S). We thank the authorities of the Tatra National Parks (TANAP in Slovakia and TPN in Poland) and State Forests of TANAP for their administrative support. We thank numerous colleagues and students for their field and laboratory help during 1992–2018, particularly geologist R. Pipík for rock sampling and Z. Hořická for chlorophyll a sampling. Participation of T. Navrátil was supported by institutional project RVO67985831.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Biology Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Hydrobiology, Na Sádkách 7, 370 05, Ceske Budejovice, Czech Republic

    Jiří Kopáček, Jiří Kaňa, Petr Porcal & Evžen Stuchlík

  2. Faculty of Science, University of South Bohemia, 370 05, Ceske Budejovice, Czech Republic

    Jiří Kopáček, Jiří Kaňa & Petr Porcal

  3. Earth Science Institute, Slovak Academy of Sciences, 059 60, Tatranská Lomnica, Slovak Republic

    Svetlana Bičárová

  4. Department of Watershed Sciences, Utah State University, 5210 Old Main Hill, Logan, UT, 84322, USA

    Janice Brahney

  5. Institute of Geology CAS, 165 00, Prague 6, Czech Republic

    Tomáš Navrátil

  6. Earth and Climate Sciences, University of Maine, Orono, ME, 04469, USA

    Stephen A. Norton

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  1. Jiří Kopáček
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Kopáček, J., Kaňa, J., Bičárová, S. et al. Climate change accelerates recovery of the Tatra Mountain lakes from acidification and increases their nutrient and chlorophyll a concentrations. Aquat Sci 81, 70 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00027-019-0667-7

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