Project Details
Projekt
Metabarcoding recent anthropogenic impact on lakes
Applicant
Professor Dr. Miklós Bálint
Subject Area
Ecology and Biodiversity of Animals and Ecosystems, Organismic Interactions
Hydrogeology, Hydrology, Limnology, Urban Water Management, Water Chemistry, Integrated Water Resources Management
Hydrogeology, Hydrology, Limnology, Urban Water Management, Water Chemistry, Integrated Water Resources Management
Term
from 2015 to 2018
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 273732160
Biodiversity is an important factor for the resilience of ecosystems, and it is strongly connected to ecosystem functioning. Biodiversity is also a sensitive indicator of ecosystem health, which is increasingly affected by anthropogenic disturbance. The consequences of long-term environmental impact on natural communities have rarely been studied experimentally, as research projects are generally scheduled only for a few years. Paleoecological records rely on the remains of a few preserved organisms and cannot be used to reconstruct the composition of entire communities. In the face of upcoming global change there is an urgent need to understand how the composition and diversity of lake communities responds to disturbance, and how these responses influence functioning of lake ecosystems. I propose to reconstruct the composition, diversity and key functions of historic eukaryote communities in lakes on a ~100-year timescale by metabarcoding sediment-preserved DNA. We will perform massively parallel DNA sequencing to characterize zooplankton, phytoplankton, benthic invertebrates and aquatic macrophyte assemblages. Our main questions are 1) how do lake community composition and diversity change over several decades on a regional scale, and what are the recovery patterns of these communities after severe disturbance? 2) Are disturbance-related changes more accented at the level of intraspecific genetic diversity, or interspecific diversity? 3) How resilient are lake communities with respect to previously inaccessible, long-term records of ecosystem functioning (prevalence of algatoxin genes, changes in trophic interactions). We will core-sample lakes on a regional scale (German and Polish Lake Districts), and analyse these samples at multiple time horizons. We will use DNA metabarcoding to combine the temporal coverage of paleoecology with the uniform data collection, taxonomic resolution and replicated design of contemporary long-term ecological studies. We will analyze the resulting data in a concise community and ecosystem ecology framework. Our work will open up new directions and opportunities to investigate biodiversity and ecosystem functioning on unprecedented spatial and temporal scales, using the potential of next-generation DNA sequencing.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
International Connection
Denmark
