Unraveling how spatial and temporal scales combine to condition lake resilience to boreal wildfires.

Wildfires will become increasingly frequent because of the foreseen increase in temperature and drought in Northern Europe. Unlike terrestrial ecosystems, wildfires´ impacts on aquatic ecosystems have, however, received very little attention.

Managers, therefore, lack science-based evidence to monitor/preserve fire-impacted freshwaters, and the society largely ignores their effects on ecosystem services.Identifying the mechanisms underlying lake resilience after wildfires remain a challenge for ecologists and ecosystem managers, and novel research must be developed to recognize ecological processes driving wildfire impacts on freshwaters as multidimensional, combining several ecological, temporal and spatial scales.This project seeks to unravel the effects of wildfires on boreal lakes, and communicate results to different target audiences to better manage fire-impacted ecosystems and increase the society´s understanding of wildfire impacts on freshwaters.

We will use landscape paleolimnological reconstructions to investigate how wildfire impacts propagate in boreal lakes (from gene to carbon flows; O1), and identify mechanisms underlying lake resilience after wildfires (O2).

We will develop a novel data-driven framework to describe how ecological, spatial, and temporal scales combine to condition the response of aquatic biodiversity to wildfire (O3). We will communicate the results to different target audiences: from the stakeholder community to the public (O4).