Read the full story from the University of Minnesota.
Warmer temperatures and increasing drought severity associated with climate change are contributing to more frequent and more severe wildfires across North America.
While attention to wildfires is commonly focused on California and the western U.S., forested regions of the Upper Midwest, including Minnesota, are maintained through well-documented fire regimes. As these fire regimes shift with climate change, there is limited knowledge of how direct wildfire burns within watersheds affect lake water quality, including which lakes are most sensitive to wildfires and what wildfire characteristics lead to the largest water quality impacts.
New research from the Natural Resources Research Institute (NRRI) at the University of Minnesota Duluth, recently published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, finds that lakes in burned watersheds had higher nutrient (nitrogen and phosphorus), dissolved organic carbon and total suspended solids concentrations, as well as reduced water clarity and pH, compared to control lakes.
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