In this project we reconstruct disturbance and climate impacts on vegetation and the Lake Victoria biota (e.g. fish, invertebrates) and limnology (e.g. eutrophication through land use). The effort is part of a large Swiss National Science Foundation SINERGIA project devoted to reconstruct rapid fish evolution under the strongly changing environmental conditions of the Postglacial. Novel high-resolution (reaching 10 years) radiocarbon-dated pollen, macrofossil, spore, and charcoal records will be gained from Lake Victoria to reconstruct vegetation, fire, browsing, and agriculture dynamics during the past >12000 years. The linkages between fish evolution, limnological dynamics, climatic variability, fire activity, browsing disturbance, forest dynamics and land-use changes will be explored in collaboration with other groups based at University of Bern and elsewhere in Europe by using concerted multiproxy approaches such as fish remain, invertebrate, aDNA, XRF and HIS analyses.
