Dr Adam Heathcote - From diatoms to DNA: lakes as sentinels of global change

IAS Visiting Fellow Dr Adam Heathcote delivers a seminar on their research - 

Although lakes make up a relatively small proportion of the Earth' surface, they are optimally situated in the landscape to serve as sentinels of natural and human-induced global change.  Lakes sit at the base of terrestrial catchments and integrate information which flows into them through stream networks or is deposited from the atmosphere. Using a variety of biological and geochemical proxies, we can use lakes to reconstruct everything from the historic and ongoing impacts of anthropogenic eutrophication to the effects of an increasingly warm planet.  I will share a few examples of classical (i.e., geochemistry, diatoms, algal pigments) and new (sediment DNA) techniques of using lake sediment archives to reconstruct environmental history and predict how these ecosystems may respond in the future.