Trends and controls on lake color in the high elevation western United States
| dc.contributor.author | Austin, Miles T., author | |
| dc.contributor.author | Ross, Matthew R. V., advisor | |
| dc.contributor.author | Hall, Ed, committee member | |
| dc.contributor.author | Bailey, Ryan, committee member | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2021-09-06T10:25:18Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2021-09-06T10:25:18Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2021 | |
| dc.description.abstract | Lakes are perceived to be having an increase in algal blooms across the Western United States due to climate change driven and other anthropogenic drivers. Despite this perception, long-term records do not exist for many lakes, so looking at macroscale patterns is challenging. We present and discuss here our results from using a remote sensing dataset, LimnoSat-US. LimnoSat-US contains Landsat imagery from 1984 to 2020. In the intermountain west, our focus study region of Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, and Utah, LimnoSat includes 1,200 lakes and over 150,000 summer observations of water color and reflectance. We used LimnoSat-US to examine what controls lake color and what, if any, changes are occurring lake color, which is a strong indicator of whether a lake is prone to algae blooms. A lake's mean depth and annual temperature were the strongest predictors of whether a lake was, on average, blue and clear or green and murky. Despite the perception of increased algae blooms, we found no consistent evidence of lakes 'greening' or shifting from mostly oligotrophic, blue, and clear to eutrophic, green, and murky. Instead, the vast majority of our lakes (> 80%) had no trend in lake color. Further, we found that our approach did not capture the dominant controls on whether not a lake was shifting from blue to green or green to blue, highlighting the need for additional work. | |
| dc.format.medium | born digital | |
| dc.format.medium | masters theses | |
| dc.identifier | Austin_colostate_0053N_16779.pdf | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/10217/233762 | |
| dc.language | English | |
| dc.language.iso | eng | |
| dc.publisher | Colorado State University. Libraries | |
| dc.relation.ispartof | 2020- | |
| dc.rights | Copyright and other restrictions may apply. User is responsible for compliance with all applicable laws. For information about copyright law, please see https://libguides.colostate.edu/copyright. | |
| dc.title | Trends and controls on lake color in the high elevation western United States | |
| dc.type | Text | |
| dcterms.rights.dpla | This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights (https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/). You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | Ecosystem Science and Sustainability | |
| thesis.degree.grantor | Colorado State University | |
| thesis.degree.level | Masters | |
| thesis.degree.name | Master of Science (M.S.) |
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