Dissertation Research: High-resolution Reconstruction of Recent and Late-Holocene Climate Change in Equatorial East Africa

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9320324 Wright Late-Quaternary sediment records from climate sensitive, closed basin lakes in tropical East Africa are testimony to the complexity of climate history at time scales ranging from millennia to years. High resolution reconstruction of the underlying history of African continental paleoclimates is complicated by individualistic response of the lakes to short-term climate change because of variation in indirect climate effects, lake levels, and salinity. This dissertation research will improve high resolution interpretation of complex sedimentary records by (1) conducting a detailed paleolimnological study of recent climate-caused environmental change in a system of four interconnected lake basins, (2) investigating the ecological sensitivity and patterns of species replacement in the lacustrine invertebrate communities of these shallow lake ecosystems, and (3) establishing the analysis of fossil assemblages of these lacustrine invertebrates as a tool in high resolution paleoclimate reconstruction. %%% Results from this dissertation research will be applied to the high resolution reconstruction of a strongly debated but poorly documented episode in climatic history of east Africa and other tropical regions: the last millennium which may include tropical equivalents of the Midieval Warm Epoch and the Little Ice Age. Much of what we know about climate change modeling at small spatial scales derives from paleolimnological studies such as this. The attempts to increase the temporal resolution of climate reconstruction will be invaluable for understanding and predicting future patterns of climate change within the the context of natural, short-term climatic variation. ***