Late Quaternary chironomid community structure shaped by rate and magnitude of climate change

Much is known about how climate change impacts ecosystem richness and turnover, but we have less understanding of its influence on ecosystem structures. Here, we use ecological metrics (beta diversity, compositional disorder and network skewness) to quantify the community structural responses of temperature-sensitive chironomids (Diptera: Chironomidae) during the Late Glacial (14 700–11 700 cal a bp ) and Holocene (11 700 cal a bp to present). Analyses demonstrate high turnover (beta diversity) of chironomid composition across both epochs; however, structural metrics stayed relatively intact. Compositional disorder and skewness show greatest structural change in the Younger Dryas, following the rapid, high-magnitude climate change at the Bølling–Allerød to Younger Dryas transition. There were fewer climate-related structural changes across the early to mid–late Holocene, where climate change was more gradual and lower in magnitude. The reduced impact on structural metrics could be due to greater functional resilience provided by the wider chironomid community, or to the replacement of same functional-type taxa in the network structure. These results provide insight into how future rapid climate change may alter chironomid communities and could suggest that while turnover may remain high under a rapidly warming climate, community structural dynamics retain some resilience.     

Effect of removing small (<150?μm) chironomids on inferring temperature in cold lakes

Sieving samples for chironomid analysis with a 150 μm mesh was shown to greatly reduce sample preparation time, and use of only larger specimens did not affect chironomid-inferred salinities in African lakes. Here, we tested if this method is suitable for temperature reconstruction in colder lakes at higher latitudes. Removal of specimens <150 μm in two training sets, one from Canada and one from Sweden, had little impact on the performance statistics of the calibration models. Chironomid abundance, however, decreased greatly because more than half of the head capsules in assemblages were <150 μm. This had major impacts on the temperature reconstructions. Inferences were on average 2°C warmer with the modified models (all specimens >150 μm) than those obtained with the full model (all specimens >100 μm). General patterns of temperature change were also altered. For Lake 7 on Southampton Island, Canada, a cooling trend was reconstructed with the full Canadian model while the modified Canadian model yielded a warming trend. When only specimens >150 μm were used, two to three times more wet sediment was needed to obtain a sufficient number of head capsules. These results indicate that, in cold lakes (mean July/August air temperature ≤11°C), large proportions of head capsules are <150 μm, and sieving the samples in a 150 μm mesh leads to altered temperature reconstructions.     

The Lateglacial and early Holocene vegetation and environment in the Dovre mountains,central Norway,as signalled in two Lateglacial nunatak lakes

By using heavy coring equipment in two high-altitudinal lakes (1253 and 1316 m a.s.l.) at Dovre, Central Norway, 1–1.5 m of unsorted coarsely minerogenic sediments were retrieved below the Holocene organic sediments. The minerogenic sequence contained well-preserved pollen and chironomid remains, revealing new and detailed palaeoenvironmental knowledge of the mountains in Central Norway during the last 5–6000 years of the Lateglacial (LG) period. However, the LG chronology is based on biostratigraphical correlations and not on ¹⁴C-dates, due to low organic content in the minerogenic sediments. The emerging LG nunataks, probably indicating a thin and multi-domed Scandinavian ice-sheet, was rapidly inhabited by immigrating species which could explain the present centric distributions of certain arctic-alpine plants. The LG vegetation development included a pre-interstadial dominated by mineral-soil pioneers, an interstadial dominated by shrubs and dwarf-shrubs, and the Younger Dryas cold period with recurring dominance of pioneers. Pollen and stomata of Pinus and Picea indicate their local LG presence at Dovre. LG climate oscillations are indicated by pollen stratigraphy and for the later part of LG also by chironomids. These oscillations could correspond to Heinrich event 1, GI-1d, GI-1b, and the Younger Dryas cold events. The LG interstadial reached July mean temperatures of more than 7–8 °C, similar to the present. Chironomids colonized the lake already during the onset of the interstadial, albeit at very low richness and abundances. Starting from YD, there are sufficient chironomid head capsules to perform a temperature reconstruction. The Holocene warming of about 2 °C initiated a vegetation closure from snow beds and dwarf-shrub tundra to shrubs and forests. Birch-forests established about 10 ka cal BP, slightly earlier than pine forests. Alnus expanded ca 9.2 ka cal BP and a thinning of the local forests occurred from ca 7 ka cal BP. Two short-lasting climate deteriorations found in the pollen record and the chironomid record may represent the Preboreal Oscillation and the 8.2 event. The Holocene Thermal Maximum is indicated around ca 7.8–7.3 ka cal BP showing a chironomid-inferred July mean of at least 11 °C. This is ca 3 °C warmer than today.     

Assessing chironomid head capsule concentrations in sediment using exotic markers

All the chironomid head capsules in a sediment sample are normally extracted to determine the concentration of chironomids. This method may be tedious since a sample may contain hundreds of head capsules. We have tested a method to estimate the concentration of chironomids in sub-samples and assessed the potential taxonomic bias generated when only a part of each sediment sample is sorted. To allow calculation of concentrations, a known quantity of exotic markers (microspheres with diameter 149–350 μm) was added to the sample. The number of head capsules in the total sample was estimated according to the ratio between the retrieved numbers of microspheres to head capsules in the sub-sample. According to our results, the chironomid concentrations estimated from sub-samples were statistically similar to the concentrations obtained by processing the full sample. Also, a sub-sample containing at least 75 head capsules was likely to have similar taxa abundances and taxa richness as the full sediment sample. These results indicate that exotic markers may be added to chironomid samples for representative concentration estimation. The method may potentially be used for other biological groups than chironomids.     

Testing intra-site transfer functions: an example using chironomids and water depth

Most calibration data sets used to infer past environmental conditions from biological proxies are derived from many sites. An alternative strategy is to derive the calibration data set from within a single site. Transfer functions derived from such intra-site calibration data sets are usually applied to fossil assemblages from the focal lake, but a recent development has been to apply these transfer functions to other sites. Transfer functions derived from intra-site calibration data sets can have impressive cross-validation performance, but that gives little indication of their performance when applied to other sites. Here, we develop transfer functions for lake depth from intra-lake chironomid calibration data sets in Norway and Alaska and test the resulting models by cross-validation and against known depth in external lakes. Lake depth is a statistically significant predictor of chironomid assemblages at all these lakes, and most intra-lake transfer functions perform reasonably well under cross-validation, but their performance against external data is erratic. Downcore reconstructions from transfer functions developed on different lakes are dissimilar. Ignoring the poorly performing transfer functions, only 3 of 14 downcore reconstructions are statistically significant. Few assemblages downcore had good modern analogues in the calibration data set, even when the core was from the same lake as the calibration data set. We conclude that intra-site calibration data sets can find site-specific rather than general relationships between species and the environment and thus should be applied with care and to external sites only after careful and critical validation.     

Daily temperature and precipitation extremes in the Baltic Sea region derived from the BaltAn65+ reanalysis

Theoretical and Applied Climatology - Daily 2-m temperature and precipitation extremes in the Baltic Sea region for the time period of 1965–2005 is studied based on data from the BaltAn65 +...