Abstract
Lake systems are essential for the environment, the biosphere, and humans but are highly impacted by anthropogenic activities accentuated by climate change. Understanding how lake ecosystems change due to human impacts and natural forces is crucial to managing their current state and possible future restoration. The high sensitivity of shallow closed lakes to natural and anthropogenic forcing makes these lacustrine ecosystems highly prone to variations in precipitation and sedimentation processes. These variation processes, occurring in the water column, produce geochemical markers or proxies recorded in lake sedimentary archives. This study investigated specific proxies on high-resolution sedimentary archives (2–3 years resolution) of the Trasimeno lake (Central Italy). The Trasimeno lake underwent three different hydrological phases during the twentieth century due to several fluctuations induced mainly by human activities and climate change. The Trasimeno lake, a large and shallow basin located in the Mediterranean area, is a good case study to assess the effects of intense anthropogenic activity related to agriculture, tourism, industry, and climate changes during the Anthropocene. The aim is to identify the main characteristics of the main sedimentary events in the lake during the last 150 years, determining the concentrations of major and trace elements, the amount of organic matter, and the mineralogical composition of the sediments. This type of work demonstrates that studying sediment archives at high resolution is a viable method for reconstructing the lake’s history through the evolution/trends of the geochemical proxies stored in the sediment records. This effort makes it possible to assess past anthropogenic impact and, under the objectives of the European Green Deal (zero-pollution ambition for a toxic-free environment), to monitor, prevent, and remedy pollution related to soil and water compartments.Graphical abstract
Highlights
Lake systems are fundamentally important for the environment, the biosphere, and humans, as they contain one of the accessible freshwater portions, are habitats for wide variety of plants and animals, and have always been the basin for civilisation (Smol et al 2001)
The small group of samples analysed by X-ray powder diffraction (XRD) showed similar spectra indicating similar types and quantities of the mineral phases presents
We found a strong negative correlation between composition similar to apatite (Ca) and Mg during the young phase (YP) phase, which indicates a decrease in Mg contained in carbonates, compared to old phase (OP)
Summary
Lake systems are fundamentally important for the environment, the biosphere, and humans, as they contain one of the accessible freshwater portions, are habitats for wide variety of plants and animals, and have always been the basin for civilisation (Smol et al 2001). The lakes are highly impacted by anthropogenic activities, accentuated by climate change (Dubois et al 2018). Understanding how lake ecosystems change, due to human impacts (such as agricultural activities, domestic sewage, atmospheric deposition, and industrial effluents) and natural forces (such as weather conditions and geological weathering), is crucial to manage their current state and future restoration (Morellón et al 2011). Shallow lake is well suited for investigating anthropogenic and natural changes in the past (Guerra et al 2015), because they are more susceptible than other lakes to bioturbation, sediment mixing processes, weather variations, and climate change. When shallow lakes are impacted by internal and external forcing, it responds rapidly (Martín-Puertas et al 2011) through marked changes in the physical-chemical and biological properties of the water column and in the mineralogical composition of the sediment
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