Regional ecosystem responses to environmental drivers in cold-water lakes evaluated using stable isotopes of salmonid fishes

Abstract

Diverse environmental drivers influence food web energy and nutrient flows, a key ecosystem function, yet their relative importance remains poorly known. We compiled thousands of bulk stable isotope measurements (carbon and nitrogen) of brown trout (Salmo trutta, n = 2854) and Arctic charr (Salvelinus alpinus, n = 3062) from 120 cold-water lakes across northern Europe, spanning 0.02 to 1090 km(2) in size, to quantify the relative importance of nine potential drivers of energy and nutrient flows. Fish community type and individual body size matched the well-described ecologies of the two species: charr shifted from littoral to pelagic sources with interspecific competition, and trout opportunistically increased their trophic position with piscivorous prey availability and increasing body size. The anthropogenic impacts of water-level regulation and catchment modification were mirrored in the two species, resulting in decreased delta C-13 values, implying increased relative pelagic production in regulated lakes, and increased delta N-15 values, possibly due to increasing cross-boundary nutrient flows. Lake size and climatic drivers (summer precipitation and winter temperature) elicited strong species-specific changes in isotope values, suggesting that predator-driven ecological responses can dominate over ecosystem-wide changes in energy and nutrient flows within lake food webs. No isotopic trends were observed with catchment productivity or shoreline complexity at the regional scale, contrasting with insights from local scale studies. This spatial mismatch suggests that environmental drivers of ecosystem processes playing out at the regional scale cannot necessarily be extrapolated from localized studies, despite correlated random lake effects capturing unexplained local baseline shifts in isotopes.