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Updated: May 24, 2026

A CO2 Concentration Gradient Facility for Testing CO2 Enrichment and Soil Effects on Grassland Ecosystem Function
Published on: November 21, 2015
Carbon dioxide supersaturation promotes primary production in lakes
Mats Jansson1, Jan Karlsson, Anders Jonsson
1Department of Ecology and Environmental Science, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden. mats.jansson@emg.umu.se
Abstract:
A majority of the world's lakes are supersaturated with respect to carbon dioxide (CO(2) ). By experimental manipulation of the CO(2) concentration in supersaturated boreal lakes, we demonstrate that phytoplankton primary production was up to 10 times higher in supersaturated lake water in comparison with water with CO(2) at equilibrium concentrations and that CO(2) , together with nutrients, explained most of the variation in pelagic primary production and phytoplankton biomass over a wide variety of unproductive lakes. These results suggest that phytoplankton can be co-limited by CO(2) and nutrients in unproductive lakes. As import of terrestrial organic carbon and its subsequent microbial mineralisation in lakes is a driving force of CO(2) -supersaturation our results suggest that lake productivity and carbon cycling may respond to variations in terrestrial organic carbon export, (e.g. caused by land use or climate change) in ways not described before.
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