Nature and landscape

Research projects

Project website

Supervision

Partners

Université ParisSaclay
Université Versaille Saint Quentin – Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement
Université Versailles Saint Quentin – Cultures Environnement Arctique Representation Climat
Utrecht University Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development
University of Bergen
North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk

The principal object of the project is to examine climatically- and anthropogenically-driven changes in terrestrial ecosystems over the Holocene in Northwest Iceland. We assess the impacts of the proposed drivers for environmental change over a transect stretching through an environmental gradient from the oceanic environs of the Skagi peninsula, across the inner lowlands, up to the highland margin and highlands. The environmentally different locations will be examined palaeoecologically in order to assess their respective ecosystem resilience to climate change and land use. We employ a multi-proxy approach, combining bio- and lithostratigraphic methods to tease out signals for vegetation change and soil erosion. The new data allows for the examination of how climate and vegetation change affects the globally important carbon pool in lakes and wetlands. The new data will inform about how the terrestrial ecosystem has responded to climate change and land-use in the past, and as such provide important information about how ecosystems may react to future climatic or anthropogenic perturbations