Metabarcoding recent anthropogenic impact on lakes
Hydrogeology, Hydrology, Limnology, Urban Water Management, Water Chemistry, Integrated Water Resources Management
Final Report Abstract
It is increasingly recognized that long-term ecological data is needed to address the ongoing biodiversity crisis. However, such data are either rare, or data collection only recently started and thus covers only the last few years. The project addressed this problem by using environmental DNA (eDNA) preserved in lake sediments as a proxy of historic biodiversity. The project aimed to record historic biodiversity changes during the recent period of agricultural intensification in North-Eastern Germany, and to compare these changes with environmental change, reconstructed from proxies of productivity, erosion and pollution. The results show a strong and rapid increase in richness in the investigated ten lakes, which largely coincides with early eutrophication in the beginning of the 20th century, although the final analyses are still running. The encountered complexities resulted in several side projects that were initially not part of the proposal, but which proved to be important for the interpretation of the results. Given the current state of data analysis I expect that the results will provide new insights on the relative importance of anthropogenic drivers of biodiversity during the 20th century, and the potentials and pitfalls of eDNA as long-term temporal biodiversity data source.
Publications
- 2018. “Environmental DNA Time Series in Ecology.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 33 (12): 945–57
Bálint, Miklós, Markus Pfenninger, Hans-Peter Grossart, Pierre Taberlet, Mark Vellend, Mathew A. Leibold, Göran Englund, and Diana Bowler
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2018.09.003) - 2018. “Proper Experimental Design Requires Randomization/balancing of Molecular Ecology Experiments.” Ecology and Evolution 8 (3): 1786–93
Bálint, Miklós, Orsolya Márton, Marlene Schatz, Rolf-Alexander Düring, and Hans-Peter Grossart
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.3687)
