Understanding the past to predict the future: Paleolimnology for management and planning of freshwater resources in a warming climate

淡水生态系统对环境压力和气候变化高度敏感。我们对长时间尺度环境变化的认识通常是通过对湖泊沉积物记录中的物理、化学和生物代用物的推断来预测的。特别重要的是要了解环境条件和养分供应的制约因素，这些因素影响许多水生物种的生存阈值和分布。淡水服务本身也受到总体生产的影响，因此这些资源的利用也受到气候和生产力变化的影响。因此，由于环境压力造成的生境和水供应的变化正成为市政服务，例如淡水供应的强烈关切。用古湖泊学的方法，湖泊可以作为过去的故事书，其中的信息可以用来校准我们对未来的预测。自然资源管理的一个固有挑战是对生态系统如何运作的基本知识。如果不了解自然变化的轨迹，就很难确立保护的目标。同样，由于生态系统已经受到几个世纪以来人类干预的影响，传统的调查往往缺乏监测信息，或者不可能获得监测信息。因此，本研究项目将重点关注水生系统变化轨迹的知识，这对市政服务校准保护目标和预测未来对环境变化的响应具有重要意义。为了实现提高我们预测环境变化对生态系统管理、保护和规划的影响的能力这一长期目标，我们在未来5年制定了三个主要的短期目标，这些目标将有助于形成关于气候变暖下生产力的推断和解释的知识；(1)量化环境条件下生物指标与流域调节梯度之间的关系；(2)从易受环境胁迫的生态系统中重建生产力；(3)将生产力和气候的古气候重建知识应用于预测、保护和城市规划。这一研究项目具有创新性和创新性，既增加了使用古气候指标量化过去环境的信心，又展示了古湖泊学在淡水资源管理和规划方面的潜力。我特别将短期目标与项目结合起来，这些项目既可以增加我们对水生生物指标产生的推断的知识，又可以将这些知识应用于“从古到政策”的方法，重点关注北极地区以及新斯科舍省当地决策者感兴趣/关注的领域。

Freshwater ecosystems are highly sensitive to environmental stress and variability in climate. Our knowledge of environmental change over long timescales is often predicated by inferences from physical, chemical, and biological proxies in lake sediment records. It is particularly important to understand constraints in both environmental conditions and nutrient availability, factors that influence the survival threshold and distribution of many aquatic species. Freshwater services are also inherently influenced by overall production, therefore use of these resources is also affected by changes in climate and productivity. As such, changes in habitat and water availability due to environmental stress are becoming strong concerns for municipal services, such as the provisioning of freshwater. With paleolimnological methods, lakes can serve as storybooks of the past, and the information contained can be used to calibrate our projections for the future. An inherent challenge for natural resource management is baseline knowledge of how ecosystems operate. Without knowledge of the natural trajectory of change, it is difficult to establish the goalposts for conservation. Likewise, monitoring information is often lacking, or not possible to obtain, with traditional surveys because ecosystems have already been influenced by centuries of human intervention. Thus, this research program will focus on  knowledge of the trajectory of change in aquatic systems of importance for municipal services to calibrate conservation goals and project future responses to environmental change. In order to address the long-term objective of improving our ability to project the influences of environmental change for ecosystem management, conservation, and planning, three primary short-term objectives are aligned over the next 5 years that contribute to knowledge that will be used to formulate inferences and interpretations of productivity in a warming climate; (1) Quantification of relationships between biological indicators and catchment-mediated gradients in environmental condition, (2) reconstruction of productivity from ecosystems prone to environmental stress, and (3) application of knowledge from paleo-climate reconstructions of productivity and climate for forecasting, conservation, and municipal planning. This research program is novel and innovative as it will both increase confidence for the use of paleo-climate indicators to quantify past environment, as well as demonstrate the potential for paleolimnology in management and planning of freshwater resources. I specifically align the short-term objectives to projects that will both increase our knowledge of inferences generated from aquatic bioindictors, but also apply this knowledge in a 'Paleo to Policy' approach focusing on areas of interest/concern for decision-makers in both the Arctic context as well as locally in Nova Scotia.