Lakes are often described as sentinels of global change. Phenomena like lake eutrophication, algal blooms, or reorganization in community composition belong to the most studied ecosystem regime shifts. However, although regime shifts have been well documented in several lakes, a global assessment of the prevalence of regime shifts is still missing, and, more in general, of the factors altering stability in lake status, is missing. Here, we provide a first global assessment of regime shifts and stability in the productivity of 1,015 lakes worldwide using trophic state index (TSI) time series derived from satellite imagery. We find that 12.8% of the lakes studied show regime shifts whose signatures are compatible with tipping points, while the number of detected regime shifts from low to high TSI has increased over time. Although our results suggest an overall stable picture for global lake dynamics, the limited instability signatures do not mean that lakes are insensitive to global change. Modeling the interaction between lake climatic, geophysical, and socioeconomic features and their stability properties, we find that the probability of a lake experiencing a tipping point increases with human population density in its catchment, while it decreases as the gross domestic product of that population increases. Our results show how quantifying lake productivity dynamics at a global scale highlights socioeconomic inequalities in conserving natural environments.
Keywords: ecological stability; global change; regime shift; remote sensing; trophic state index.