Palaeolimnology and pigments: investigating limnology from the bottom of the lake
Abstract: Lake sediments can provide precious records of environmental change extending back decades, centuries and millenia. The study of lake sediments (palaeolimnology) involves the analysis and dating of physical, chemical, and biological remains in sediment core sequences. Palaeolimnology is ideal for understanding ecological and limnological processes that occur over longer timescales and is particularly useful in remote and developing regions where environmental monitoring programmes are scarce. Focusing mainly on sedimentary chlorophyll and carotenoid pigments as biomarkers for phototrophs, I will discuss examples of how palaeolimnology in tropical, temperate and Arctic regions can help to understand the impact of global environmental change on lakes. Using this approach can illuminate a different “from the bottom” view of how lakes function.
Biography: Suzanne is a palaeolimnologist with expertise in chlorophyll and carotenoid pigment analysis who is currently the Head of Aquatic Ecology at the Netherlands Institute for Ecology (NIOO-KNAW). Suzanne did her BSc and PhD at the University of Liverpool in the UK. Her PhD investigated whether cyanobacterial blooms were a “natural” feature in lakes of the West Midland Meres district. She then moved to Copenhagen, based at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland as a Marie Curie fellow investigating climate influences on long-term lake evolution in Kangerlusssuaq (West Greenland), before a 3-year postdoctoral position at the University of Regina in Canada which investigated floodplain lakes of the Peace-Athabasca Delta in northern Alberta. She took up a position at the University of Nottingham in 2004 and stayed there until 2021, promoted to Associate Professor in 2010 and Professor in 2017. Between 2013 and 2016 she was seconded to the Nottingham Malaysia campus as Head of the School of Geography. She was appointed as an Honorary Fellow of the Freshwater Biological Association in 2020 and an Honorary Professor at the University of Nottingham after she left to join NIOO in October 2021.