Dr. Benjamin Kraemer – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Dr. Benjamin Kraemer

University of Freiburg
Aquatic Ecology

Early Career Fellow
October 2024 – July 2025

Last Update: 08.11.2024

Curriculum Vitae

Dr. Benjamin M. Kraemer is a global change aquatic scientist focusing on the physical responses of lakes to climate change. He has contributed to over 30 peer-reviewed publications and numerous collaborative team projects. He merges disparate data sources and modeling approaches to maximizing the spatial and temporal scope of his work. His predominantly global scale research is grounded by several regional foci including specific lakes in Europe, North America, and East Africa. He graduated magna cum laude from Lawrence University in 2008 with a B.A. in Environmental Science. He obtained his Ph.D. in Freshwater and Marine Science under Dr. Peter McIntyre at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2010 to 2015. His dissertation was titled “Global patterns in lake ecosystem responses to climate change”. Kraemer serves on the steering committee of the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network and has contributed to key reports on climate change including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). With a passion for teaching, he has taught lab courses in Limnology, Aquatic ecology, Fish Ecology, and led workshops on Scientific Communication, and using R for statistical computing.

Selected Publications

BM Kraemer, K Kakouei, C Munteanu, MW Thayne, R Adrian. Worldwide moderate-resolution mapping of lake surface chl-a reveals variable responses to global change (1997-2020). PLOS Water, 2022. link
BM Kraemer, RM Pilla , RI Woolway , O Anneville , S Ban , W Colom-Montero , SP Devlin , MT Dokulil , EE Gaiser , KD Hambright, et al. Climate change drives widespread shifts in lake thermal habitat. Nature Climate Change. 2021. link
RI Woolway, BM Kraemer, JD Lenters, CJ Merchant, CM O’Reilly, S Sharma. Global lake responses to climate change. Nature Reviews: Earth and Environment. 2020. link
BM Kraemer. Rethinking discretization to advance limnology amid the ongoing information explosion. Water Research. 2020. link
BM Kraemer, O Anneville, S Chandra, M Dix, E Kuusisto, D Livingstone, A Rimmer, G Schladow, E Silow, L Sitoki, Y Vadeboncoeur, PB McIntyre. Morphometry and average temperature affect lake stratification responses to climate change. Geophysical Research Letters. 2015. link

FRIAS Project

Lake dead zones: global drivers and sensitivity to climate change

Dead zones occur at the mouths of polluted rivers where the decomposition of excessive algae depletes oxygen so that few organisms can survive. Dead zones in the world’s oceans can extend hundreds of kilometers from shore and receive considerable attention for their adverse effects on ecosystems, fisheries, and coastal communities. In contrast, the global extent, drivers, and consequences of dead zones in the world’s lakes remain uncertain despite their importance for drinking water, recreation, and biodiversity. Here, I propose to finish past work combining remotely sensed and in situ datasets to map dead zones at the mouths of major inflowing rivers in more than 100 of the world’s largest lakes and asses their changes from 1997 to 2023. My preliminary findings suggest that lake dead zones occur across geographic and climatic gradients and are associated with a combination of urban and agricultural activities in their watersheds. The FRIAS Early Career fellowship will allow me to expand these preliminary findings and publish a paper which documents the global extent and landscape drivers of lake dead zones. I will further leverage this publication to write a Volkswagen Foundation proposal which explores the sensitivity of lake and marine dead zones to climate change. Examining the similarities and differences between marine and lake dead zones will cross traditionally siloed research domains and help optimize the sustainable stewardship of both aquatic environments.