Combining contemporary ecology and palaeolimnology to understand shallow lake ecosystem change

Sayer, Carl D., Davidson, Thomas A., Jones, John Iwan and Langdon, Peter G. (2010) Combining contemporary ecology and palaeolimnology to understand shallow lake ecosystem change. Freshwater Biology, 55 (3), 487-499. (doi:10.1111/j.1365-2427.2010.02388.x).

Abstract

1. Palaeolimnology and contemporary ecology are complementary disciplines but are
rarely combined. By reviewing the literature and using a case study, we show how linking
the timescales of these approaches affords a powerful means of understanding ecological
change in shallow lakes.
2. Recently, palaeolimnology has largely been pre-occupied with developing transfer
functions which use surface sediment-lake environment datasets to reconstruct a single
environmental variable. Such models ignore complex controls over biological structure
and can be prone to considerable error in prediction. Furthermore, by reducing species
assemblage data to a series of numbers, transfer functions neglect valuable ecological
information on species’ seasonality, habitat structure and food web interactions. These
elements can be readily extracted from palaeolimnological data with the interpretive
assistance of contemporary experiments and surveys. For example, for one shallow lake,
we show how it is possible to infer long-term seasonality change from plant macrofossil
and fossil diatom data with the assistance of seasonal datasets on macrophyte and algal
dynamics.
3. On the other hand, theories on shallow lake functioning have generally been developed
from short-term (<1–15 years) studies as opposed to palaeo-data that cover the actual
timescales (decades–centuries) of shallow lake response to stressors such as eutrophication
and climate change. Palaeolimnological techniques can track long-term dynamics in lakes
whilst smoothing out short-term variability and thus provide a unique and important
means of not only developing ecological theories, but of testing them.
4. By combining contemporary ecology and palaeolimnology, it should be possible to gain
a fuller understanding of changing ecological patterns and processes in shallow lakes on
multiple timescales.

This record has no associated files available for download.

Contributors

Author: Peter G. Langdon

Download statistics