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Covering more than 50 years of monitoring data on the water quality parameters of Lake Stechlin (deims.org/2223bc9c-12b2-49fe-af73-4299f553e054), this study highlights the unique value of Long-Term Ecosystem Research (LTER) for understanding ecosystem responses to multiple, interacting environmental stressors. Lake Stechlin, a deep, dimictic hardwater lake in northeastern Germany, known for its exceptional water clarity and endemic cold-water biota, has experienced profound environmental changes over recent decades. These include intense thermal pollution associated with the operation of a nearby nuclear power plant (1966–1990), which substantially increased surface water temperatures on average by 3°C and reduced water residence time from formerly more than 60 years to less than 300 days (Koschel and Adams 2003). Ongoing climate-driven warming leads to declining winter ice cover and changes in stratification patterns. The long-term dataset documents major shifts in the lake’s physical, chemical, and biological conditions. Since 2010, Lake Stechlin has shown signs of eutrophication despite the absence of apparent external nutrient inputs from the catchment (Gonsiorczyk et al. 2024). Total phosphorus concentrations increased fourfold and deep-water oxygen depletion expanded substantially until 2021, followed by a recent reversal of this trend and corresponding re-oligotrophication. Analyses suggest a complex interplay between changes of thermal regimes, stratification dynamics, and internal phosphorus cycling between littoral and pelagic zones (Gonsiorczyk et al. 2024, Hilt et al. 2025). These findings indicate that climate-induced alterations of lake physics can become key drivers of nutrient dynamics and affect the water quality of deep temperate lakes, even if located in a rather undisturbed catchment. Beyond revealing long-term ecosystem trajectories under environmental change, the curated dataset and comprehensive metadata, now publicly available (Wollrab et al. 2025) following FAIR and Open Data principles, provide valuable resources for comparative studies and global meta-analyses of lake ecosystem responses to climate change. Long-term datasets such as this from Lake Stechlin are also essential for the calibration and validation of ecosystem models and for developing future projections under different climate scenarios, thereby supporting evidence-based management and mitigation strategies. The Lake Stechlin dataset represents the outcome of more than five decades of continuous monitoring effort across multiple generations of technical and scientific staff and demonstrates the irreplaceable contribution of LTER infrastructures to understanding, preserving, and sustainably managing aquatic ecosystems in a rapidly changing world.