Lakes: Witnesses of Changes

Dear Colleagues,

In the current age we face unprecedented acceleration of human impacts on the environment. It has been calculated that such acceleration will have consequences over thousands of years. The term Anthropocene was proposed for this epoch, naming it as a period of flexible—region-dependent—duration, during which human impacts can already be detected but are not globally synchronous. More recently the term Pyrocene was also proposed, to stress the increasing impact of fires all over the planet.

Lakes and reservoirs are the largest freshwater reserve immediately available on the planet, a reserve that, on a global scale, is sufficient but not abundant and not homogeneously distributed. Allowing for tracing and addressing ongoing changes over the long-term, as well as historical and prehistorical impacts on the local, regional and global scales, lakes are the best witnesses of past and present changes, and of their consequences in time and space. They trace, incorporate and process different impacts acting at different spatial and temporal scales. Different types of impacts result in differential responses of lake biological communities, modifying their spatial and temporal development and their interactions. Human disturbance on lake biotic communities and biogeochemical cycles and, increasingly, novel stressors (e.g., land use and overexploitation of freshwater resources, climate, fire, pollution, and species introductions) interact over diverse spatial and temporal scales, making it difficult to develop a hierarchical understanding of how these processes are likely to influence lakes presently and in the future.

In this volume, we present evidence of different types of impact on lakes all over the world by integrating paleolimnological studies with neolimnological studies and documental archives.

Dr. Andrea Lami
Dr. Piero Guilizzoni
Dr. Liisa Nevalainen
Guest Editors

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• paleolimnology
• limnology
• anthropocene
• pyrocene
• archives
• lake biological communities