Dear Eos:
Earth’s estuaries are hot spots of carbon cycling. Muskegon Lake is a highly productive urbanized estuary that drains the second-largest watershed in Michigan into the second-largest Laurentian Great Lake: Lake Michigan.
Our aim is to quantify the carbon flux in this dynamic ecosystem through experiments and time series measurements that track changes in oxygen concentration (as a metabolic proxy for equimolar changes in carbon) in the lake.
Here, graduate student Kaylynne Dennis collects surface water to fill clear bottles that will be deployed in Muskegon Lake to study daily rates of photosynthesis and dark bottles to study respiration. Biweekly experimental measurements will be complemented with seasonal shipboard and continuous time series measurements of oxygen concentration by the Muskegon Lake Observatory.
How will river loading, thermal stratification, wind mixing, and algal blooms affect in-lake carbon metabolism, and what effect will the ongoing El Niño conditions have on the net carbon balance of this estuary? Our results should shed light on these questions.
—Bopi Biddanda, Kaylynne Dennis, Tony Weinke, and Eric Snyder, Robert B. Annis Water Resources Institute, Grand Valley State University, Muskegon, Mich., and Steve Ruberg, NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, Ann Arbor, Mich.