Climate Change-Legacy Phosphorus Synergy Hinders Lake Response to Aggressive Water Policy Targets
Issue Date
2022-04-27Author
Zia, Asim
Schroth, Andrew W.
Hecht, Jory S.
Isles, Peter
Clemins, Patrick J.
Turnbull, Scott
Bitterman, Patrick
Tsai, Yushio
Mohammed, Ibrahim N.
Bucini, Gabriela
Doran, Elizbeth M. B. Doran
Koliba, Christopher
Bomblies, Arne
Beckage, Brian
Winter, Jonathan
Adair, Elizabeth C.
Rizzo, Donna M.
Gibson, William
Pinder, George
Publisher
AGU
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, publisher version
Rights
© 2022 The Authors. Earths Future published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Geophysical Union. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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Show full item recordAbstract
With mounting scientific evidence demonstrating adverse global climate change (GCC) impacts to water quality, water quality policies, such as the Total Maximum Daily Loads (TMDLs) under the U.S. Clean Water Act, have begun accounting for GCC effects in setting nutrient load-reduction policy targets. These targets generally require nutrient reductions for attaining prescribed water quality standards (WQS) by setting safe levels of nutrient concentrations that curtail potentially harmful cyanobacteria blooms (CyanoHABs). While some governments require WQS to consider climate change, few tools are available to model the complex interactions between climate change and benthic legacy nutrients. We present a novel process-based integrated assessment model (IAM) that examines the extent to which synergistic relationships between GCC and legacy Phosphorus release could compromise the ability of water quality policies to attain established WQS. The IAM is calibrated for simulating the eutrophic Missisquoi Bay and watershed in Lake Champlain (2001–2050). Water quality impacts of seven P-reduction scenarios, including the 64.3% reduction specified under the current TMDL, were examined under 17 GCC scenarios. The TMDL WQS of 0.025 mg/L total phosphorus is unlikely to be met by 2035 under the mandated 64.3% reduction for all GCC scenarios. IAM simulations show that the frequency and severity of summer CyanoHABs increased or minimally decreased under most climate and nutrient reduction scenarios. By harnessing IAMs that couple complex process-based simulation models, the management of water quality in freshwater lakes can become more adaptive through explicit accounting of GCC effects on both the external and internal sources of nutrients.
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Citation
Zia, A., Schroth, A. W., Hecht, J. S.,Isles, P., Clemins, P. J., Turnbull, S., et al. (2022). Climate change-legacy phosphorus synergy hinders lake response to aggressive water policy targets. Earth's Future, 10, e2021EF002234 https://doi.org/10.1029/2021EF002234
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as: © 2022 The Authors. Earths Future published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Geophysical Union. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.