Resistance, recovery, and resilience: Lake responses to an extreme weather event vary among water quality variables and depths

Climate change is shifting the frequency, duration, and intensity of extreme weather events, with significant consequences for natural ecosystems. Lakes are particularly sensitive to such disturbances, yet their short- and long-term responses are often poorly characterized due to a lack of continuous monitoring data. Using an 8-year high-frequency dataset, we quantified the resistance, recovery, and resilience of Lake Tūtira to Cyclone Gabrielle across structural (water temperature, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, chlorophyll-a, and phycocyanin) and integrative (thermocline depth, hypoxic depth, depth of chlorophyll-a peak and depth of phycocyanin peak) water quality variables throughout the water column. Resistance to the cyclone varied greatly across structural variables, whereas integrative variables exhibited similar resistance across the physical-biological gradient. Recovery dynamics further highlighted ecosystem complexity, with structural variables returning to baseline faster than integrative variables and recovery times ranging from days to approximately one year. Surface waters also tended to recover faster than deeper waters. Long-term daily resilience metrics indicated that post-event differences from Cyclone Gabrielle were detectable in the lake ecosystem one year after the cyclone, but not in subsequent years. These findings highlight the utility of intensive lake monitoring in order to predict ecosystem responses to changing extreme weather regimes.