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

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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.