Phenological Whiplash in Lakes

Climate change is leading to overall warming and increasing variability across many ecosystems. In northern lakes, extremely early or late lake ice melt has cascading effects throughout the food web. This webinar will discuss how the increasing unpredictability of seasonal environmental cues in lakes will lead to mistimed ecological interactions and evolutionary selection pressures that may reduce the response diversity of ecosystems. Managing for diversity will become paramount for developing resilient aquatic ecosystems. From genes to ecosystems, the impacts of climate change--and the accompanying abrupt changes to eco-evolutionary dynamics that may arise--should be viewed through the lens of climate variability as well as average long-term warming.