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Whole lake primary production assessment by bio-optical modelling

Uwe Langner, Torsten Jakob, Jörg Toepel, Christian Wilhelm

 Abstract

A hypertrophic lake in Leipzig has been analyzed with respect to the basic limnological parameters, nutrients and phytoplankton community dynamic in the course of the year 2002. A bio-optical model was developed to assess the daily primary production based on the spectrally resolved surface irradiance, the light climate in the euphotic zone of the water column, the quantification of the light absorption by the phytoplankton and its photosynthetic efficiency measured with the help of in-vivo Chl a-fluorescence. Summing up the modeled primary production per day for the whole vegetation period it turned out that the productivity was no limited by the nutrients but by the light only. This is the first report that an adopted bio-optical modeling can be used to assess the annual primary production of a whole freshwater lake.