Scientists Launch $2.3 Million Push to Build First Global Lake Metabolism Database

Freshwater scientists have long possessed detailed metabolic maps of forests, grasslands, croplands, and even the open ocean, yet the inland waters that dot nearly every landscape on Earth have remained stubbornly opaque. That gap is now set to close. With $2.3 million in new funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies is leading the creation of the first large-scale, open-access public collection of lake metabolism data, a resource called the Global LAke Metabolism Repository, or GLAMR. Cary Institute is receiving $1 million of the award, with the remaining funds supporting project partners at the University of Colorado Boulder, Grand Valley State University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The repository will draw together daily measurements from at least 300 lakes across the planet, producing what its architects describe as hundreds of millions of individual observations of water quality drawn from lakes on every inhabited continent.

The scientific problem GLAMR addresses is deceptively simple to state and remarkably hard to solve. Lake metabolism refers to the balance between the carbon a lake takes up through photosynthesis, performed by plants and algae, and the carbon it releases through respiration, the process by which living organisms break down food into energy and carbon dioxide. That balance, expressed as the difference between gross primary production and ecosystem respiration, determines whether a given lake functions as a net carbon sink or a net carbon source, how much energy flows into its food web, and whether its waters remain hospitable to the uses people depend on. As Cary aquatic ecologist Christopher Solomon, who leads the effort, explained, the processes being quantified play a huge role in determining the suitability of lakes for drinking water, recreation, and fisheries.

Why has this fundamental quantity gone unmeasured at scale? Part of the answer lies in the sheer heterogeneity of the world’s lakes. Ecosystems everywhere show distinctive seasonal rhythms of production and respiration. Temperate deciduous forests in the northeastern United States, for example, run high rates of photosynthesis through the summer, then see photosynthesis plummet and respiration dominate during the leafless, snow-covered winter months. Mediterranean forests behave differently, keeping photosynthesis above respiration throughout the year in a pattern that depends more on spring and autumn rains. These metabolic signatures are well characterized for most major ecosystem types. Lakes, ponds, and reservoirs, by contrast, have resisted the same systematic treatment, in part because their conditions can shift dramatically from day to day and from one basin to the next, and because the instruments needed to capture those shifts have only recently become widespread.

The consequence of that blind spot is more than an academic inconvenience. Without a global picture of lake metabolism, scientists cannot accurately quantify the role inland waters play in the global carbon cycle or in the Earth system more broadly, and they cannot predict how lakes will respond to global change. Lakes are known to process, transport, and store substantial amounts of carbon, and warming temperatures, altered precipitation, nutrient runoff, and shifting ice cover all have the potential to reconfigure the metabolic balance of these systems. Solomon noted that the lack of understanding limits the ability to quantify the role of lakes in the carbon cycle and to forecast their trajectories under environmental change, a limitation GLAMR is explicitly designed to remove.

Assembling the repository is an exercise in data harmonization as much as data collection. Some of the information GLAMR will incorporate already exists, but it is scattered across hundreds of published and unpublished sources, collected with different instruments, calibrated differently, and stored in incompatible formats. GLAMR will organize and harmonize these datasets, pulling together daily measurements of dissolved oxygen, water temperature, wind speed, and other variables that together allow researchers to compute metabolism at the scale of individual lakes and then compare those patterns across continents. Solomon identified the data infrastructure as the most challenging part of the project, describing the task of integrating hundreds of millions of data points published by hundreds of different researchers as a big and ambitious undertaking. He added that the team already has a strong start, thanks to earlier support from Cary Institute’s Science Innovation Funds and from Grand Valley State University.

New data will continue to flow in from collaborators around the world, many of them affiliated with the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network, known as GLEON, an international grassroots network of scientists, students, educators, policy makers, and citizens who study and monitor lake ecosystems. High-frequency sensors deployed on buoys and moorings, such as the long-running monitoring buoy on Lake Mendota in Wisconsin, capture the fine-scale fluctuations in oxygen and temperature that underpin modern metabolism estimates, and GLEON’s distributed community of lake observers provides both the instruments and the local expertise. Cary Institute ecologist Kathleen Weathers, who co-created GLEON and serves as senior personnel on the project, described GLAMR as very much an outgrowth of that network, saying she is excited to play a role in guiding and participating in GLAMR’s extension and expansion of networked lake science.

Training the next generation of freshwater scientists is built into the project’s design. Weathers will lead a training program for GLEON graduate fellows that guides early-career researchers in conducting GLAMR-enabled research, ensuring that the repository is not merely a static archive but a living platform that cultivates new analytical approaches and new questions. Data in the repository will be published and made available to interested scientists everywhere, reflecting the project’s open-access ethos. In an era when reproducibility and data sharing are increasingly central to credible science, GLAMR’s commitment to making hundreds of millions of harmonized observations publicly available positions it as infrastructure for the entire discipline rather than the private resource of a single research group.

Once the repository is assembled, Solomon and colleagues will move from curation to synthesis. Their first analytical targets include defining the various lake metabolism archetypes, the recurring patterns of production and respiration that characterize different classes of lakes, and understanding why those archetypes differ in time and space. From there, the team aims to predict how lake metabolism might change in the future as climate warming, land use change, and other pressures continue to reshape inland waters. Such archetype-based classification could ultimately allow researchers to extrapolate from the hundreds of monitored lakes in GLAMR to the millions of lakes worldwide, turning a curated dataset into a globally predictive framework for freshwater carbon cycling and water quality.

The project’s leadership spans four institutions, each bringing complementary strengths. Christopher Solomon of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies serves as lead principal investigator, joined by Isabella Oleksy of the University of Colorado Boulder, Stuart Jones of Grand Valley State University, and Paul Hanson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with Kathleen Weathers of Cary Institute serving as senior personnel. The combination of long-term sensor deployments, ecosystem modeling expertise, and network coordination experience mirrors the interdisciplinary character of the question itself, which sits at the intersection of ecology, biogeochemistry, limnology, and data science.

For a field that has watched its study sites warm, stratify differently, and lose ice cover year after year, the arrival of a unified global metabolism database marks a turning point. What individual researchers have observed at their own lakes, sometimes for decades, will finally become comparable, combinable, and visible at planetary scale. If GLAMR succeeds, the metabolic rhythms of the world’s lakes, ponds, and reservoirs will move from the margins of ecosystem science into the same well-mapped territory long occupied by forests, grasslands, and the ocean, giving scientists a fighting chance to understand, and anticipate, how the freshwater systems humanity depends upon will fare in a changing world.

Subject of Research: Creation of a global open-access lake metabolism database to study lake health, carbon cycling, and climate impacts

Article Title: Cary to lead $2.3 million NSF-funded effort to build global lake ecosystem database

Article References: Cary to lead $2.3 million NSF-funded effort to build global lake ecosystem database. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: lake metabolism, GLAMR, Cary Institute, National Science Foundation, carbon cycle, freshwater ecology, water quality, GLEON, dissolved oxygen, primary production, respiration, open-access database