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The relative influences of climate and catchment processes on Holocene lake development in glaciated regions

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Abstract

Following deglaciation, the long-term pattern of change in diatom communities and the inferred history of the aquatic environment are affected by a hierarchy of environmental controls. These include direct climate impacts on a lake’s thermal and hydrologic budgets, as well as the indirect affects of climate on catchment processes, such as weathering, soil development, microbial activity, fire, and vegetation composition and productivity, which affect the transfer of solutes and particulates from the terrestrial ecosystem into the lake. Some of these catchment influences on lacustrine systems operate as time-dependent patterns of primary succession that are set in motion by glacier retreat. This paper provides a conceptual model of some dominant pathways of catchment influence on long-term lake development in glaciated regions and uses a series of paleolimnological examples from arctic, boreal, and temperate regions to evaluate the relative role of direct climate influences and of catchment processes in affecting the trajectory of aquatic ecosystems during the Holocene in different environmental contexts.

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Acknowledgments

This manuscript is dedicated to Rick Battarbee, who was instrumental in catalyzing each of our interests in diatoms and lakes. We also acknowledge Dan Engstrom for many discussions over the years on lake ontogeny. We are grateful to Bianca Perren and Hilary Birks for providing their data from SS16 and SS49, which are plotted in Fig. 3. The preparation of this manuscript was funded in part by NSF EAR08-16576 to Fritz.

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  1. Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Nebraska Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, 68588-0340, USA

    S. C. Fritz

  2. Department of Geography, Loughborough University, Loughborough, LE11 3TU, UK

    N. J. Anderson

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A celebration of Prof. Rick Battarbee's contributions to palaeolimnology, edited by Holmes et al.

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Fritz, S.C., Anderson, N.J. The relative influences of climate and catchment processes on Holocene lake development in glaciated regions. J Paleolimnol 49, 349–362 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10933-013-9684-z

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