Topic III - Environmental issues > III-6-Inferring the Past Drivers and Consequences of Lake Eutrophication in Modern and Ancient Societies

Conveners

1. Matthew N Waters (Department of Crop, Soil, and Environmental Sciences, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, USA)
2. Adam Heathcote (St. Croix Watershed Research Station, Science Museum of Minnesota, Saint Paul, MN, USA)
3. Mark Brenner (Department of Geological Sciences, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA)

Human-mediated landscape alterations, e.g., agricultural development and urbanization, can drive changes in limnological conditions of nearby lakes, often causing eutrophication and its attendant consequences - algae/cyanobacteria blooms, toxin production, and regime shifts.  Many lakes are currently experiencing profound limnological changes, but the onset of hypereutrophy and harmful algal blooms (HABs) seen in many waterbodies today may be linked to past periods of landscape alteration, caused by climate changes and/or human disturbances that predate limnological monitoring efforts.  This session will focus on the role of past landscape disturbances and how such perturbations served as drivers of changing lake trophic state.  Paleolimnological records across all timescales and periods of historic/prehistoric human disturbance will be welcome in the session.  Inferred limnological conditions from pre-disturbance periods are required to set realistic lake management targets, i.e., conditions that are expected following the decline or complete removal of nutrient subsidies caused by human agency.  We invite poster and oral presentations on studies that have employed proxy variables for lake trophic status found in lacustrine sediments (e.g., element chemistry, stable isotopes, organic molecules [pigments, toxins], diatoms, cladocerans, chironomids, etc.), especially investigations that were also undertaken to identify human-mediated stressors on the landscape that caused past lake trophic state shifts.