The Memory of the Mud webinar with Liz Factor, PhD
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"The Memory of the Mud: Paleolimnology reveals the impact of climate change on modern cyanobacterial bloom occurrence" Webinar Handout
This is a handout from our webinar, "The Memory of the Mud: Paleolimnology reveals the impact of climate change on modern cyanobacterial bloom occurrence". Paleolimnology is a multidisciplinary science that uses aquatic sediments to track past changes in ecosystems. It can be used to study the past when current monitoring data does not exist. Understanding the past is key to putting environmental issues in context. The best way to control algal blooms is through prevention, which includes minimizing nutrient concentrations by reducing nutrient runoff from a catchment.
"The Memory of the Mud" webinar with Liz Favot, PhD
This webinar was originally recorded on December 6, 2023 for the Freshwater Stewardship Community webinar series. Over the past few decades there has been a rise in confirmed reports of cyanobacterial (blue-green algal) blooms in Ontario waterbodies. These blooms can reduce the recreational and property value of affected waterbodies, alter aquatic food webs, contaminate drinking water, and pose serious health hazards. Although nutrient pollution is the most common driver of nuisance cyanobacterial blooms globally, a high proportion of cyanobacterial blooms occurring in oligotrophic (low nutrient, spring total phosphorus less than 10 µg/L) waterbodies in Ontario suggests that there may be links to climate warming, including increased water temperatures, reduced wind speed, and a longer ice-free season, rendering conditions more favourable for these blooms to occur. This seminar will demonstrate how subfossils of algae and invertebrates preserved in lake sediments can be used to reconstruct long-term trends in nutrients, oxygen, primary production, and effects of climate change, to periods pre-dating direct water column measurements, allowing the investigation of environmental drivers for the observed increasing prevalence of cyanobacterial blooms in the 21st century.