Impacts of Changing Winter Conditions on Lakes will Increase with Latitude

Climate change is especially rapid during winter and at high latitudes. Among the consequences of changing winters are reductions to ice cover duration and modifications to winter precipitation patterns. Understanding how these winter-period changes impact lake ecosystems is complicated by a historical neglect of winter by limnologists. Here, we propose a framework that integrated winter into full year limnological dynamics of lakes across large latitudinal gradients. We show that high latitude lakes are especially sensitive to winter conditions and will respond more strongly to the loss of ice than lakes at lower latitudes.