Jonathan Cole
ole has been an emeritus scientist since 2014. Cole is a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A former President of the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO), Cole is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Geophysical Union. He is the author or co-author of about 230 peer reviewed scientific papers and several books.During his active research career, Cole studied the sources of carbon and its movements in rivers, lakes, and estuaries. Cole focused on the connections between these ecosystems and their surrounding watersheds. He and colleagues have shown that at a global scale, up to 50 percent of the carbon that is stored in soils is eventually exported to streams, rivers, and lakes, in the form of particles and dissolved organic matter or turned to carbon dioxide in these inland aquatic environments. The realization that inland waters play a role in the regional and global C cycle has changed the way that modelers have approached C sequestration on land.
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recipient food webs. Four whole-lake additions of dissolved inorganic 13C were made to reveal the pathways of subsidies to lakes from terrestrial dissolved organic carbon (t- DOC), terrestrial particulate organic carbon (t-POC) and terrestrial prey items. Terrestrial DOC, the largest input, was a major subsidy of pelagic bacterial respiration, but little of this bacterial C was passed up the food web. Zooplankton received <2% of their C from the t-DOC to bacteria pathway. Terrestrial POC significantly subsidized the production of both zooplankton and benthic invertebrates, and was passed up the food web to Chaoborus and fishes. This route supplied 33–73% of carbon flow to zooplankton and 20–50% to fishes in non-fertilized lakes. Terrestrial prey, by far the smallest input, provided some fishes with >20% of their carbon. The results show that impacts of cross-ecosystem subsidies depend on characteristics of the imported material, the route of entry into the food web, the types of consumers present, and the productivity of the recipient system.
watershed and ultimately export much of
this N to coastal waters, which in turn can be substantially
affected by these inputs. Although the
control of N export is complex, for large rivers
among-system variation is predicted relatively well
by simple models of human activity. Using data
from 249 predominantly North Temperate watersheds
that varied in size from 0.1 to over 1,000,000
km2, we examined whether these simple models
lose their predictive power at smaller scales. We
found that the relationship between human population
density and NO3 export becomes weaker at
smaller scales, and that for watersheds less than 100
km2, it explains only 8% of the 1000-fold variation
in NO3 export. However, NO3 export predicted
from a simple loading model related well to measured
NO3 export across all scales; linear regressions
of log modeled versus log measured export for small
(less than 100 km2), mid-sized (100–10,000 km2),
and large (more than 10,000 km2) watersheds were
all highly significant (P 0.01) and had r2 values of
0.78, 0.63, and 0.77, respectively. For the smallest
systems, however, the model was biased and predicted
higher NO3 export than was measured. The
bias suggests slightly greater storage or gaseous N
loss in smaller watersheds, whereas the tight correlation
between predicted and measured export indicates
that for small as well as large systems,
among-system variation in NO3 export is controlled
primarily by anthropogenic N loads rather than
site-specific variations in soil or vegetation characteristics.
Across all scales, however, predictive models
can be improved by the inclusion of these local
parameters.
Key words: NO3 export; rivers; watersheds; human impacts, N Biogeochemistry
recipient food webs. Four whole-lake additions of dissolved inorganic 13C were made to reveal the pathways of subsidies to lakes from terrestrial dissolved organic carbon (t- DOC), terrestrial particulate organic carbon (t-POC) and terrestrial prey items. Terrestrial DOC, the largest input, was a major subsidy of pelagic bacterial respiration, but little of this bacterial C was passed up the food web. Zooplankton received <2% of their C from the t-DOC to bacteria pathway. Terrestrial POC significantly subsidized the production of both zooplankton and benthic invertebrates, and was passed up the food web to Chaoborus and fishes. This route supplied 33–73% of carbon flow to zooplankton and 20–50% to fishes in non-fertilized lakes. Terrestrial prey, by far the smallest input, provided some fishes with >20% of their carbon. The results show that impacts of cross-ecosystem subsidies depend on characteristics of the imported material, the route of entry into the food web, the types of consumers present, and the productivity of the recipient system.
watershed and ultimately export much of
this N to coastal waters, which in turn can be substantially
affected by these inputs. Although the
control of N export is complex, for large rivers
among-system variation is predicted relatively well
by simple models of human activity. Using data
from 249 predominantly North Temperate watersheds
that varied in size from 0.1 to over 1,000,000
km2, we examined whether these simple models
lose their predictive power at smaller scales. We
found that the relationship between human population
density and NO3 export becomes weaker at
smaller scales, and that for watersheds less than 100
km2, it explains only 8% of the 1000-fold variation
in NO3 export. However, NO3 export predicted
from a simple loading model related well to measured
NO3 export across all scales; linear regressions
of log modeled versus log measured export for small
(less than 100 km2), mid-sized (100–10,000 km2),
and large (more than 10,000 km2) watersheds were
all highly significant (P 0.01) and had r2 values of
0.78, 0.63, and 0.77, respectively. For the smallest
systems, however, the model was biased and predicted
higher NO3 export than was measured. The
bias suggests slightly greater storage or gaseous N
loss in smaller watersheds, whereas the tight correlation
between predicted and measured export indicates
that for small as well as large systems,
among-system variation in NO3 export is controlled
primarily by anthropogenic N loads rather than
site-specific variations in soil or vegetation characteristics.
Across all scales, however, predictive models
can be improved by the inclusion of these local
parameters.
Key words: NO3 export; rivers; watersheds; human impacts, N Biogeochemistry