Development of European lakes

Alongside the few ‘exotic’ environmental archives, such as coprolites (Kelso and Solomon, 2006; Yll et al., 2006), soils (Andersen, 1986) or ice cores (Azuara et al., 2015; Brugger et al., 2018a) the greatest natural archives for biological remains on the continents are the sediments in lakes and the peat of mires. For physical and chemical records ice cores and stalagmites also play important roles.
The challenges, opportunities and risks with using lakes and mires as natural archives for tracing environmental history arise from the fact that both the local and the regional signals are simultaneously embedded in the sediment or the peat. Lakes and mires ‘write down’ their own histories. If we are able to read these ‘autobiographies’ and if we can connect them to the regional histories we may understand the relevant processes behind biotic changes at several scales. The precondition is that in the biotic record we can separate local events from regional ones.
For the study of vegetation history an estimate of the sedimentation rate is relevant, because it controls the temporal resolution that can be achieved and thus the sampling strategy for a specific question.