Lake Kasumigaura long-term monitoring station - Japan

We have been monitoring Lake Kasumigaura, the second largest lake in Japan, monthly for nearly four decades. We have monitored not only environmental variables, water quality, nutrients, and heavy metals, but also plankton (e.g., bacteria, heterotrophic nanoflagellates, ciliates, picoplankton, phytoplankton, zooplankton, mysids), primary production, benthos (chironomids and oligochetes), and fish. To increase data availability and the numbers of data users, we created an English web database (http://db.cger.nies.go.jp/gem/moni-e/inter/GEMS/database/kasumi/index.html) in this research period, and strengthened our relationships with international observational networks. We also provided monitoring data to the Japan Long-Term Ecological Research Network (JaLTER; http://www.jalter.org/index.php?ml_lang=en) and published two data papers in the international journal Ecological Research (Takamura et al. 2012 a, b). We have also started to register fish monitoring data in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) (http://www.gbif.org/dataset/f648085b-8e1c-4a79-bc8d-f45d36296564) .