Catastrophic shifts in large lake levels

Abstract

Large lakes are important to buffering the potential impacts of global climate change on local water resources that millions of people's livelihoods depend on. However, abrupt changes in water level from one extreme to another (e.g., flood to drought) over short periods of time have been observed recently, threatening aquatic ecosystems and socio-economics in globe. We argue that the seemingly rare dramatic extreme changes are no longer incidental, but are becoming a new norm. The combined forces of ongoing climate change and anthropogenic intensification in many parts of the world are presumably the root causes. More prevalent than the retreating glaciers, lakes are more vulnerable to human modification, an emerging dimension of global changing environment. We call for mechanistic understanding of the interactions of climate-watershed-human across major lakes. Such international collaborative efforts are essential to developing effective solutions to mitigate the impacts of drought and floods in global large-lake regions.