Lake Functioning: Internal Phosphorus Loading, Cyanobacteria, and Climate Change

Author Biography

Gertrud K. Nürnberg has been an environmental scientist for more than 40 years studying and modelling the geochemistry of lakes and reservoirs. She holds a Ph.D. (1984) from McGill University, Montreal, Canada, on “The availability of phosphorus from anoxic hypolimnia to epilimnetic plankton”, very much the subject of this book. As head of Freshwater Research, she has focused on the restoration and modeling of eutrophic lakes and reservoirs. Main interests include the sediment-water interactions in stratified and polymictic lakes, especially phosphorus release from lake bottom sediments, using several methods to quantify internal phosphorus loading. She has developed theoretical and limnological concepts, most importantly the anoxic factor, which describes the temporal and spatial spread of anoxia in lakes. She is active in science as a previous editor and constant reviewer for numerous journals. As she is particularly interested in the improvement of the status quo, she has contributed to lake restoration by publishing on and investigating several techniques to decrease internal phosphorus loading and hence curtail cyanobacterial blooms. Her efforts have been recognised by several awards from the North American Lake Management Society (NALMS.org).