Lakes, carbon and microbes: a hidden world

While forests do a great job of taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, as soon as the trees decompose, all that carbon goes straight back up again. And a new study has investigated how that decomposition works inside freshwater lakes. Scientists have found that what was traditionally just called “carbon” in a lake is actually a hugely diverse mix of different carbon-based molecules, which supports an equally diverse mix of microbes. And the more diverse everything is, the more greenhouse gases these lakes seem to pump out - which could be bad news if different species of trees react differently to climate change, and drop new carbon compounds into lakes. Phil Sansom heard from the study’s author, Andrew Tanentzap...