Wang, Xinchang;
Byun, Eunji;
Turner, Simon;
Yang, Handong;
Baker, Ambroise;
Roberts, Carole;
Bennion, Helen;
(2024)
Shallow urban lakes record industrial history over the last century: a paleolimnological study of three lochs in Greater Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom.
Journal of Paleolimnology
10.1007/s10933-024-00339-7.
(In press).
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Abstract
Globally, freshwater ecosystems are increasingly facing anthropogenic stressors. One such stressor is urban development which not only alters land use but also increases pollutant loads to aquatic systems. Shallow freshwater lakes in urban areas are susceptible to excess nutrients and other contaminant inputs, leading to degraded water quality and ecosystem change. In this study, we applied a paleolimnological approach to investigate lake-ecosystem changes in suburban areas in response to historical anthropogenic stressors. The city of Glasgow, Scotland, is renowned as one of the major centers for the Industrial Revolution in the United Kingdom (UK), and three lakes situated in and around the city were investigated to reconstruct the historical changes surrounding the lake ecosystems. Diatom microfossils, supplemented with plant and insect macrofossils, and geochemical elements, were analyzed as indicators of chemical and ecological change in the lakes over the last 150 years. Two lakes in heavily industrialized urban catchments were found to have evident signs of eutrophication with the greatest ecological change seen in the lake with high hydrological connectivity. The third lake had a different management history due to private land ownership and did not show a clear sign of eutrophication. The study highlights the potential of paleolimnology for exploring the history of urban waterbodies. It suggests that local land-use history and degree of connectivity are important considerations in assessing the onset, degree and nature of environmental change and can result in lakes with varying types of anthropogenic stressors and variable impacts, even within the same small geographical region. This variation needs to be taken into account when designing lake-specific eutrophication management strategies.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Shallow urban lakes record industrial history over the last century: a paleolimnological study of three lochs in Greater Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1007/s10933-024-00339-7 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10933-024-00339-7 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. |
| Keywords: | Diatom, Urban development, Hydrological connectivity, Eutrophication, Freshwater ecosystem |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Geography |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10198610 |
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