Lenard scheme for two dimensional periodic Volterra chain

We prove that for compatible weakly nonlocal Hamiltonian and symplectic operators, hierarchies of infinitely many commuting local symmetries and conservation laws can be generated under some easily verified conditions no matter whether the generating Nijenhuis operators are weakly nonlocal or not. We construct a recursion operator of the two dimensional periodic Volterra chain from its Lax representation and prove that it is a Nijenhuis operator. Furthermore we show this system is a (generalised) bi-Hamiltonian system. Rather surprisingly, the product of its weakly nonlocal Hamiltonian and symplectic operators gives rise to the square of the recursion operator.