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Data for: Human activity coupled with climate change strengthens the role of lakes as an active pipe of dissolved organic matter

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Aug 29, 2023 version files 89.11 KB

Abstract

This dataset contains data from an investigation to resolve the relative importance of multiple environmental drivers on the quantity and quality of chromophoric DOM in lakes at the continental scales. The study is described in the paper: “Du Y., Chen F., Zhang Y., He H., Wen S., Huang X., Song C., Li. K., Wang J., Kellings D., and Lu Y. 2023. Human activity coupled with climate change strengthens the role of lakes as an active pipe of dissolved organic matter, Earth’s Future, in press”. 

The primary objectives of the study were to (i) quantity the magnitude of environmental drivers modulating lacustrine DOM quantity and quality at a continental scale, including climate, land cover, societal development, and water retention time, and (ii) unravel individual and interactive effects of the environmental drivers.

Firstly, we constructed a structural equation model framework that incorporated both direct and indirect pathways.

Secondly, we collected a continental-scale dataset of lake DOM quantity and quality, along with the corresponding environmental driver variables from a group of carefully selected lakes (n=182).

Lastly, we established structure equation models to analyze DOM quantity and quality variations as a function of the four environmental drivers.

The main results include: (1) land cover and societal development both exhibit positive direct effects on lake CDOM quantity, highlighting the significant role of well-vegetated soils and anthropogenic activities as sources of lake DOM on a continental scale. (2) Climate has two strong but opposite effects –a warming and wet climate facilitates soil OM production and export but also enhances CDOM in-lake transformation. (3) Three proxies are proposed as indicators of the magnitude of biogeochemical drivers influencing lake DOM across ecoclimatic zones, including fluorescent DOM/DOC indicating economic activity, percentages of a degraded fluorescent DOM component indicating solar irradiation, and percent tyrosine-like DOM reflecting DOM processing time within the watershed and lake.