The Cascade project is a whole-ecosystem experimental test of the theory that:
1) increased variance
2) red-shift of variance
3) critical slowing down of recovery rate across components of a food web
are leading indicators of a common type of regime shift in lake ecosystems caused by changes in the structure of the fish community.
Variability will be assessed at all trophic levels for three years in both a manipulated lake and a non-manipulated reference lake using high-frequency data acquisition methods including automated in situ instrumentation for analysis of alagal biomass and primary production, zooplankton abundance and size structure, acoustical measure of fish migration, and daily measures of fish growth from otoliths. Modern signal processing methods of time series, spectral and wavelet analysis will evaluate changes in variance, variance sprectra and return rate.
