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Monitoring: safeguarding the world's largest lake

Nature volume 538, page 41 (2016)Cite this article

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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.

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 (M. V. Moore et al. Bioscience 59, 405–417; 2009 and S. E. Hampton et al. Glob. Change Biol. 14, 1947–1958; 2008).

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  1. Maxim A. Timofeyev: *On behalf of 5 correspondents (see Supplementary information for full list).

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  1. Irkutsk State University, Russia

    Maxim A. Timofeyev

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  1. Maxim A. Timofeyev
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Correspondence to Maxim A. Timofeyev.

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Timofeyev, M. Monitoring: safeguarding the world's largest lake. Nature 538, 41 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/538041a

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