Research within the Paleolimnology group is directed towards
analyses of climate and environmental changes and their causes,
with a focus on human impact. Our assessments of long-term
environmental changes are based primarily on the analysis of
natural environmental archives such as lake sediments and peat
bogs. Many of today's environmental problems, such as lake
acidification, lake eutrophication, heavy metal accumulation in
aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, as well as climate change
are not spontaneous events, rather they are the consequence of
long-term perturbations. The present status of terrestrial and
aquatic ecosystems and, more generally, the environment cannot
be properly understood without knowledge of the historical
developments leading up to the present day. Paleoecological
studies are essential to our understanding the scale and rate of
environmental and climatic changes in the modern world. To
assess the impact of human activities on ecosystems and global
climate it is necessary to develop a