Dataset Information

Under the radar: long-term perspectives on ecological changes in lakes.

ABSTRACT: Aquatic ecosystems are constantly changing due to natural and anthropogenic stressors. When dealing with such 'moving targets', one of the greatest challenges faced by scientists, managers and policy makers is to use appropriate time scales for environmental assessments. However, most aquatic systems lack monitoring data, and if a programme does exist, rarely have data been collected for more than a few years. Hence, it is often difficult or impossible to determine the nature and timing of ecosystem changes based on these short-term datasets. Furthermore, as environmental assessments are typically performed after a problem is identified, critical data regarding pre-disturbance (or reference) conditions are rarely available. Here, I summarize some recent studies employing lake sediment analyses (i.e. palaeolimnology) that have provided retrospective assessments of ecosystem changes that have been emerging slowly and often innocuously 'under the radar'. My examples include the identification of legacy effects of acid rain and logging, namely long-term declines in calcium concentrations in softwater lakes, which have led to significant repercussions for ecosystem services. I then show that past trajectories of aerial pollution from the burgeoning oil sands operations of western Canada can be tracked using environmental proxies preserved in dated sediment cores, and how these data can be used to determine the relative contributions of natural versus industrial sources of pollutants. I conclude by reviewing how palaeolimnological analyses have linked climate change with the proliferation of harmful blue-green algal (cyanobacterial) blooms, even without the addition of limiting nutrients. Collectively, these studies show that effective ecosystem management, particularly for incremental environmental stressors, requires temporal sampling windows that are not readily available with standard monitoring, but can be supplemented with high-resolution lake sediment analyses.

SUBMITTER: Smol JP

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6650715 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Under the radar: long-term perspectives on ecological changes in lakes.

Smol John P JP

Proceedings. Biological sciences 20190710 1906

Aquatic ecosystems are constantly changing due to natural and anthropogenic stressors. When dealing with such 'moving targets', one of the greatest challenges faced by scientists, managers and policy makers is to use appropriate time scales for environmental assessments. However, most aquatic systems lack monitoring data, and if a programme does exist, rarely have data been collected for more than a few years. Hence, it is often difficult or impossible to determine the nature and timing of ecosy ...[more]

PMID: 31288704

Similar Datasets

Project description:It has been reported that several aspects of human health could be disturbed during a long-term isolated environment (for instance, the Mars-500 mission), including psychiatric disorders, circadian disruption, temporal dynamics of gut microbiota, immune responses, and physical-activity-related neuromuscular performance. Nevertheless, the mechanisms underlying these disturbances and the interactions among different aspects of human adaptation to extreme environments remain to be elucidated. Epigenetic features, like DNA methylation, might be a linking mechanism that explains the involvement of environmental factors between the human genome and the outcome of health. We conducted an exploration of personalized longitudinal DNA methylation patterns of the peripheral whole blood cells, profiling six subjects across six sampling points in the Mars-500 mission. Specifically, we developed a Personalized Epigenetic-Phenotype Synchronization Analysis (PeSa) algorithm to explore glucose- and mood-state-synchronized DNA methylation sites, focusing on finding the dynamic associations between epigenetic patterns and phenotypes in each individual, and exploring the underling epigenetic connections between glucose and mood-state disturbance. Results showed that DMPs (differentially methylated-probes) were significantly enriched in pathways related to glucose metabolism (Type II diabetes mellitus pathway), mood state (Long-term depression) and circadian rhythm (Circadian entrainment pathway) during the mission. Furthermore, our data revealed individualized glucose-synchronized and mood-state-synchronized DNA methylation sites, and PTPRN2 was found to be associated with both glucose and mood state disturbances across all six subjects. Our findings suggest that personalized phenotype-synchronized epigenetic features could reflect the effects on the human body, including the disturbances of glucose and mood-states. The association analysis of DNA methylation and phenotypes, like the PeSa analysis, could provide new possibilities in understanding the intrinsic relationship between phenotypic changes of the human body adapting to long-term isolation environmental factors.

Dataset Information

Under the radar: long-term perspectives on ecological changes in lakes.

Publications

Under the radar: long-term perspectives on ecological changes in lakes.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets