My first paper on lake resilience
Recently, a paper on lake resilience to climate change, in which I had the pleasure to make a modest contribution, has been published in journal The Holocene. The full title of the paper is Resilience, rapid transitions and regime shifts: Fingerprinting the responses of Lake Żabińskie (NE Poland) to climate variability and human disturbance since AD 1000, and was led and nicely coordinated by Ivan Hernández-Almeida.
The paper basically consists of a review and synthesis of the various interdisciplinary contributions from a number of members of the Climpol project. The aim of this project is to produce a “quantitative reconstruction of winter and summer temperature (variability, trends, amplitudes and extremes) in northern Poland during the last 1000 years”. Following the spirit of this project, the paper reviews two independent climate reconstructions performed for winter and summer in the Lake Żabińskie, in northern Poland, together with various climate simulations. It also compiles and analyses evidence from life activity recorded within the varves of the sediments of the lake to explore the impact of land use, nutrients and erosion in the system dynamics, resilience and disturbance regimes during the last millennium. Thus, the study tackles two topics: regional climate variability and lake resilience. The paper describes how the natural climate change prior AD 1600 does not surpass the resilience of the lake. From that point, and especially after AD 1745, the intense deforestation had a direct and drastic effect on the lake watershed and affected the lake ecosystem. All in all, the analysis demonstrates how human impact since the 17th century has surpassed the resilience capacity of the lake ecosystems.
Although I do not officially work within the Climpol project, and paleolimnology is certainly beyond my area of expertise, Ivan and Martin Grosjean contacted me when I was working at the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research to offer me a collaboration. They asked me if I could contribute with the various climate model simulations I have carried out for that region. Thereby, my largest contribution to this paper consists of providing the climate model data (I provided my own regional climate simulations with MM5, plus I downloaded various GCM simulations from the PMIP3). Further, together with Martin and Iván, we carried out the analysis on climate variability, which compares the simulated and reconstructed climate series in tries to harmonise both datasets and draw conclusions from the agreements and mismatches. This analysis is summarised in the Figure 2 in the paper and the text that discusses it. By the way, the shadowed series it depicts were inspired by the 4th IPCC figure on reconstructions uncertainty within the Paleoclimatology chapter.
Tags: paper publications
Categories: Science
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