A 1600-year record of human impacts on a floodplain lake in the Mississippi River Valley

Brugam, Richard B.; Muñoz, Samuel E.

doi:10.1007/s10933-018-0033-0

Cited by 9 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 64 publications

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“…angustissima , and later Stephanodiscus hantzschii , became abundant during this period. These species are indicators of nutrient enrichment in many locations around the world and can be abundant in shallow eutrophic lakes (Kilham, Kilham & Hecky, 1986; Reynolds et al, 2002; Bicudo et al, 2016; Brugam & Munoz, 2018). Fragilaria tenera was also dominant, and is inferred to prefer shallow and turbid waters (Reynolds et al, 2002; Padisák, Crossetti & Naselli‐Flores, 2009).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using palaeolimnology to guide rehabilitation of a culturally significant lake in New Zealand

Short

Tibby

Vandergoes

et al. 2022

Aquatic Conservation

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Lakes are becoming degraded at an accelerating rate owing to human activity, and understanding their past ecology is necessary for lake management and rehabilitation. Palaeolimnology provides numerous methods that enable the historical state of lakes to be determined. New Zealand provides an ideal setting in which to do this as human modification of the landscape occurred later here than in most regions of the world (approx. 1300 CE). Lake Oporoa is a shallow lake that is highly significant to the local indigenous Māori community. This study used multiple proxy palaeolimnology to explore how lake ecology shifted following Māori and European settlement in the catchment, and how palaeolimnological data can be used to inform lake rehabilitation and conservation measures, alongside the desires of the indigenous community. Sedimentary pollen, diatoms, bacterial communities, and elemental and hyperspectral imaging scanning were used to infer ecological changes in the lake and catchment from pre‐human times to present. Following Māori settlement (approx. 1620 CE) there was gradual vegetation change and a rapid shift in diatom and bacterial assemblages, but not in phytoplankton pigments or sediment geochemistry. An increasing abundance of diatom taxa Discostella stelligera and Staurosirella cf. ovata indicates early nutrient enrichment. European pastoralism from approximately 1840 CE resulted in further deforestation, and all proxies show evidence for enhanced primary productivity driven by a combination of nutrient enrichment and changing lake levels, particularly since the 1960s. This has caused degradation in water quality and is likely to have contributed to the decline in populations of tuna (eel, Anguilla spp.). Conversations with local Māori, together with the palaeolimnological results, indicate that a culturally acceptable and realistic rehabilitation target for Lake Oporoa aligns with ecological conditions in the 1950s. The palaeoecological data provide information to guide catchment and lake revegetation and other methods of nutrient abatement, with the eventual aim of restoring culturally important tuna and native fish populations.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using palaeolimnology to guide rehabilitation of a culturally significant lake in New Zealand

Short

Tibby

Vandergoes

et al. 2022

Aquatic Conservation

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“…Industrial pollutants change river chemistry (Meade and Moody, 2010), and extensive damming upstream retains sediment so that the river can no longer effectively build new land downstream (Chamberlain et al, 2018). Additionally, vegetation has been changing along the river since the times of Cahokian indigenous settlement (~600–1350 CE; Brugam and Munoz, 2018), leading to widespread loss of sediment from its drainage basin, changes to the morphology of the river, and introduced biota crowding out native wildlife; all such processes have subsequently accelerated due to the industrialization of farming during the Anthropocene (Knox, 2001).…”

Section: The Mississippi River As a Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The Mississippi system was initially locally influenced by indigenous North Americans through patchy deforestation and agriculture (e.g. Brugam and Munoz, 2018; Scharf, 2010; Smith, 2009), evident as shifts in nutrient inputs and biotic assemblages preserved in lake sediments. Such changes were greatly accelerated by early European settlers through deforestation, agriculture, mining, and urbanization, resulting in enhanced regional-scale nutrient loading and an increased diversity of pollutants (Gibling, 2018).…”

Section: The Anthropogenically Influenced Mississippi Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Geological evolution of the Mississippi River into the Anthropocene

Russell

Waters

Himson

et al. 2021

The Anthropocene Review

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The Mississippi River maintains commercial and societal networks of the USA along its >3700 km length. It has accumulated a fluvial sedimentary succession over 80 million years. Through the last 11,700 years of the Holocene Epoch, the wild river shaped the landscape, models of which have become classic in geological studies of ancient river strata. Studies of the river were led by the need to develop infrastructure and to search for hydrocarbons, through which, these models have become quite sophisticated. However, whilst the models demonstrate how the wild river behaves, a monumental shift in fundamental controls on the entire fluvial system, broadly coinciding with the proposed mid-20th century onset of the Anthropocene Epoch, has generated new geological patterns that are becoming globally ubiquitous, and which the Mississippi River typifies. As such, whilst classic Holocene river models may be compared to human-modified systems such as the Lower Mississippi River (and others worldwide), locally the models may now only directly apply to its fossilized components preserved in the sub-surface. Such river models need adapting to better understand the present dynamics, and future evolution of these landscapes.

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“…Extending far beyond the area around Cahokia, settler colonialism involved not only violent dispossession but also myriad transformations to the basin’s landscapes and functional ecotopes as a result of the imposition of European forms of political economy, agricultural practices, and technologies. These changes marked the land: human impacts in the MRB increased many orders of magnitude in the 19th century, as even the stratigraphic record of the region’s rivers as lakes testifies (Brugam and Munoz, 2018; Knox, 2006).…”

Section: Cradles Of History Built On Sedimentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: The Mississippi River Basin—a model for studying the Anthropocene insitu

Rosol

Turnbull

Renn

2021

The Anthropocene Review

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Is it possible to trace ongoing transitions in the Earth system back to the regional scales at which they are produced and where their effects can be directly experienced? This editorial introduces two special issues of The Anthropocene Review that document a two-year, transdisciplinary experiment: a collaborative investigation of the Mississippi River Basin (MRB) as a model region for studying the Anthropocene condition in situ. Coordinated by the Anthropocene Curriculum, an initiative led by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science,1 the project Mississippi: An Anthropocene River involved a large consortium of institutions and more than three hundred researchers, artists, activists, and local community members. Together, participants learned about, questioned, and experienced the Anthropocene at a level meaningful to people, a level at which historical legacies and future commitments play out amid concrete infrastructures and socio-ecological formations, and alongside existing inequalities and life’s everyday struggles. The introduction summarizes eleven scientific and creative research outputs that were selected from this wide-ranging experiment, contextualizes the river’s history, and explains the regional approach the project undertook.

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A 1600-year record of human impacts on a floodplain lake in the Mississippi River Valley

Abstract: In North America, land use practices of the last two centuries have strongly influenced aquatic communities and freshwater quality,

Cited by 9 publications

References 64 publications

Using palaeolimnology to guide rehabilitation of a culturally significant lake in New Zealand

Using palaeolimnology to guide rehabilitation of a culturally significant lake in New Zealand

Geological evolution of the Mississippi River into the Anthropocene

Introduction: The Mississippi River Basin—a model for studying the Anthropocene insitu

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