Lake Malawi (also known as Lake Nyasa in Tanzania, and Lake Niassa in Mozambique) is the world’s third deepest lake and is well known for its biodiversity. It is also an important source of food to millions of people living in the lake’s watershed. Current threats to this unique system include overfishing, excessive loading of sediment and nutrients, and climate change which is driving changes in lake levels, mixing regime and plankton dynamics. Our research on Lake Malawi has addressed conservation needs, food web structure, fish ecology, nutrient biogeochemistry, and plankton ecology. Most recently, through collaboration with Dr. Maxon Ngochera in the Malawi Fisheries Department, we completed a study of lake-atmosphere CO2 exchange, which provides insight into the mechanisms regulating carbon dynamics in this large, tropical lake and indicates that it is a net sink for atmospheric CO2.
