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Diatom-based models for inferring past water chemistry in western Ugandan crater lakes

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Abstract

Diatom surface sediment samples and corresponding water chemistry were collected from 56 lakes across a natural conductivity gradient in western Uganda (reflecting a regional climatic gradient of effective moisture) to explore factors controlling diatom distribution. Here we develop a regional training set from these crater lakes to test the hypothesis that this approach, by providing more appropriate and closer analogues, can improve the accuracy of palaeo-conductivity reconstructions, and so environmental inferences in these lake systems compared to larger training sets. We compare this output to models based on larger, but geographically and limnologically diverse training sets, using the European Diatom Database Initiative (EDDI) database. The relationships between water chemistry and diatom distributions were explored using canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) and partial CCA. Variance partitioning indicated that conductivity accounted for a significant and independent portion of this variation. A transfer function was developed for conductivity (r 2jack  = 0.74). Prediction errors, estimated using jack-knifing, are low for the conductivity model (0.256 log10 units). The resulting model was applied to a sedimentary sequence from Lake Kasenda, western Uganda. Comparison of conductivity reconstructions using the Ugandan crater lake training set and the East Africa training set (EDDI) highlighted a number of differences in the optima of key diatom taxa, which lead to differences in reconstructed values and could lead to misinterpretation of the fossil record. This study highlights issues of how far transfer functions based on continental-scale lake datasets such as the EDDI pan-African models should be used and the benefits that may be obtained from regional training sets.

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Acknowledgments

This work was completed by KM as part of a Ph.D. carried out at and funded by Loughborough University. KM is currently a Research Fellow working within the University of Ballarat’s Collaborative Research Network. Financial support for the fieldwork was provided through NERC (UK) within a New Investigators’ Competition award (NE/D000157/1) to DBR, and grants from the Quaternary Research Association and the British Institute in Eastern Africa to KM. Additional support for isotopic analyses of water samples by the NERC Isotope Geosciences Laboratory (NIGL award code IP/884/1105). Fieldwork in Uganda was supported by the Department of Geology at Makerere University, Makerere University Biological Field Station (Kibale) and Loughborough University. We thank the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology (permit EC482), Uganda Wildlife Authority and the Office of the President for fieldwork permission. We thank Dirk Verschuren, Bob Rumes, Hilde Eggermont (Ghent University) for providing sediment samples and lake data and Georg Schettler (GeoForschungsZentrum), Lei Chou (Université Libre de Bruxelles) and Renaat Dasseville (Ghent University) for the processing of the water chemistry samples. Many sincere thanks go to John Anderson, Sergi Pla, Immaculate Ssemmanda, Julius Lejju and (especially) Richard Nyakoojo for their invaluable help in the field.

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  1. Centre for Environmental Management, School of Science, Information Technology and Engineering, University of Ballarat, Ballarat, VIC, 3353, Australia

    Keely Mills

  2. Department of Geography, Centre for Hydrological and Ecosystem Science (CHES), Loughborough University, Loughborough, LE11 3TU, Leics, UK

    David B. Ryves

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  1. Keely Mills
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Correspondence to Keely Mills.

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Mills, K., Ryves, D.B. Diatom-based models for inferring past water chemistry in western Ugandan crater lakes. J Paleolimnol 48, 383–399 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10933-012-9609-2

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