What is it about?
Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia is listed as a World Heritage Site by the United Nations because of its exceptional endemic biodiversity. Its ecological and environmental health is now under threat from a government funding cut of almost 30% to the lake’s long-term monitoring programme.
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Why is it important?
Biologists at Irkutsk State University have been sampling water temperature, transparency, and plankton abundance and species composition at weekly intervals, year-round, since 1945. Lake Baikal remained largely pristine in the twentieth century, but its ecosystems are changing fast as surface waters warm and winter ice cover lessens.
Perspectives
Long-term monitoring of the health of the world’s deepest lake is crucial. The cost of sustaining it (less than US$70,000 a year) is vanishingly small relative to the ecological and economic value of this global resource.
Professor Eugene A. Silow
Irkutskij gosudarstvennyj universitet
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Monitoring: safeguarding the world's largest lake, Nature, October 2016, Nature,
DOI: 10.1038/538041a.
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