The littoral zone ecosystem of the Three Gorges Reservoir (TGR) has become significantly degraded by annual cycles of prolonged winter flooding and summer drought. For purposes of flood control and sediment management, the water level in the reservoir is lowered by 30 m during the summer monsoon season and raised again to 175 m above sea level each year at the end of the monsoon period. To expl...

The continuous increase in the number of reservoirs globally has raised important questions about the environmental impact of their greenhouse gases emissions. In particular, the littoral zone may be a hotspot for production of greenhouse gases. We investigated the spatiotemporal variation of CO2 flux at the littoral zone of a Chinese reservoir along a wet-to-dry transect from permanently flood...

Tourists can adversely influence the ecology of oligotrophic lakes by increasing algal production via direct nutrient inputs and/or re-suspension of sediments. To assess the influence of tourists on food web dynamics, we used natural abundance stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen to calculate the relative importance of autochthonous and allochthonous carbon sources to littoral zone food webs ...

This study quantifies the role of lake morphometry and submerged macrophyte beds on the accumulation of sediments in the littoral zone. Stable Pb, a historical marker of lacustrine sediments in southern Quebec, was used to date the sediments (;110 yr) and to calculate three long-term sediment accumulation rates (SARs) in Lake Memphremagog (located in Quebec and Vermont). The anthropogenic Pb bu...

The relationships between long-term (;115-year) phosphorus and sediment accumulation and submerged macrophyte biomass were determined both within a submerged macrophyte bed and among beds in Lake Memphremagog, Quebec, Canada. Strong relationships between present submerged macrophyte biomass and littoral-zone sediment and phosphorus accumulation rates both within and among macrophyte beds yielde...

Resources and organisms in food webs are distributed patchily. The spatial structure of food webs is important and critical to understanding their overall structure. However, there is little available information about the small-scale spatial structure of food webs. We investigated the spatial structure of food webs in a lake ecosystem at the littoral transition zone between an inflowing river ...

The effects of tides on littoral marine habitats are so ubiquitous that shorelines are commonly described as 'intertidal', whereas waves are considered a secondary factor that simply modifies the intertidal habitat. However mean significant wave height exceeds tidal range at many locations worldwide. Here we construct a simple sinusoidal model of coastal water level based on both tidal range an...

To evaluate the effects of macrophytes presence in the structure of littoral fish assemblages in the littoral zone, monthly samples were collected from September, 2006 to August, 2007 in an impounded tributary of the Itá Reservoir, the Fragosos River, located in the Upper Uruguay River Basin. Fish were collected using a beach seine and sampling was conducted in the littoral zone inside a macrop...

Numerical simulation of threedimensional groundwater flow near lakes shows that the continuity of the boundary encompassing the local groundwater flow system associated with a lake is the key to understanding the interaction of a lake with the groundwater system. The continuity of the boundary can be determined by the presence of a stagnation zone coinciding with the side of the lake nearest th...