Understanding Historical and Predicting Future Lake Temperatures in North and South Dakota

Lakes, reservoirs, and ponds are central and integral features of the North Central U.S. These water bodies provide aesthetic, cultural, and ecosystem services to surrounding wildlife and human communities. External impacts – such as climate change – can have significant impacts to these important parts of the region’s landscape. Understanding the responses of lakes to these drivers is critical for species conservation and management decisions.

 

Water temperature data are foundational to providing this understanding and are currently the most widely measured of all aquatic parameters with over 400 unique groups monitoring water temperature in U.S. lakes and rivers. However, lake temperature data are lacking at the relevant spatial and temporal scales needed for decision-making, and there has been a lack of national coordination and synthesis of these data collection efforts. Assembling and harmonizing this wealth of data would provide a valuable resource for modeling, analyzing, and predicting water temperature.

 

This project will build upon previous work funded by the Northeast CASC that provided a foundation for modeling and predicting water temperature of approximately 11,000 lakes in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Project researchers are expanding those efforts by using the modeling techniques from the previous project, along with existing temperature data, to reconstruct a historical record of water temperatures from 1979 to 2018 and generate predictions for tens of thousands of lakes in the prairie pothole region of North and South Dakota. With this information, the team will also analyze the habitat suitability of these lakes to several fish species.

 

Data from this project will help water and natural resource managers clarify and quantify risks to fish populations, for example by identifying where the preferred thermal habitat of a species is projected to disappear and put the fish at risk of local extirpation. Results will be directly relevant to understanding the health of water resources in the North Central U.S. and can inform specific conservation actions.