Ecosystem maturity modulates greenhouse gases fluxes from artificial lakes

Highlights: • C cycling variability and its variability in artificial lakes have been overlooked. • We quantified gas fluxes in 11 gravel pit lakes across a gradient of ecosystem maturity. • Lakes ranged from heterotrophic to autotrophic as maturity increased. • Eutrophication turns lakes as CO₂-sinks. • CH₄ emissions and associated climate impacts increased with ecosystem maturity. Lentic ecosystems play a major role in the global carbon cycling but the understanding of the environmental determinants of lake metabolism is still limited, notably in small artificial lakes. Here the effects of environmental conditions on lake metabolism and CO₂ and CH₄ emissions were quantified in 11 small artificial gravel pit lakes covering a gradient of ecosystem maturity, ranging from young oligotrophic to older, hypereutrophic lakes. The diffusive fluxes of CO₂ and CH₄ ranged from −30.10 to 37.78 mmol m⁻² d⁻¹ and from 3.05 to 25.45 mmol m⁻² d⁻¹ across gravel pit lakes, respectively. Nutrients and chlorophyll a concentrations were negatively correlated with CO₂ concentrations and emissions but positively correlated with CH₄ concentrations and emissions from lakes. These findings indicate that, as they mature, gravel pit lakes switch from heterotrophic to autotrophic-based metabolism and hence turn into CO₂-sinks. In contrast, the emission of CH₄ increased along the maturity gradient. As a result, eutrophication occurring during ecosystem maturity increased net emissions in terms of climate impact (CO_{2 equivalent}) due to the higher contribution of CH₄ emissions. Overall, mean CO_2equivalent emission was 7.9 g m⁻² d⁻¹, a value 3.7 and 4.7 times higher than values previously reported in temperate lakes and reservoirs, respectively. While previous studies reported that lakes represent emitters of C to the atmosphere, this study highlights that eutrophication may reverse lake contribution to global C budgets. However, this finding is to be balanced with the fact that eutrophication also increased CH₄ emissions and hence, enhanced the potential impact of these ecosystems on climate. Implementing mitigation strategies for maintaining intermediate levels of maturity is therefore needed to limit the impacts of small artificial waterbodies on climate. This could be facilitated by their small size and should be planned at the earliest stages of artificial lake construction.