Limnological data derived from high frequency monitoring buoys are asynchronous in a large lake

Autonomous data collection is rapidly becoming an integral part of water quality monitoring, particularly for agencies looking to manage and protect aquatic ecosystems. While beneficial, it is unclear how the collection of these data can be applied in spatially complex large lakes (e.g., Laurentian Great Lakes) given the spatial heterogeneity of the ecosystem. To address this potential shortcoming in large lakes, we assessed the synchrony of sensor variables between 10 pairs of static buoys in the western basin of Lake Erie (western basin surface area =  3,282 km2). Within western Lake Erie, water temperature was highly synchronous whereas dissolved oxygen, turbidity, chlorophyll and phycocyanin were asynchronous. The extent of this asynchrony was higher with increasing spatial distance between buoys. We found that between pairs of static buoys, temperature, dissolved oxygen, and turbidity all experienced decreasing correlations with increasing distance. Our results show that if researchers intend to leverage these data to answer important questions and provide real-time applications related to environmental issues like harmful algal/cyanobacterial blooms, monitoring networks need to be designed carefully with spatial complexity in mind. While autonomous data collection has many benefits, the reliance on a single or limited network of anchored monitoring buoys in large lake ecosystems has a high probability of missing important spatial features of these systems.