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Interactions of climate and land use documented in the varved sediments of Seebergsee in the Swiss Alps

Institute of Plant Sciences, University of Bern, Altenbergrain 21, CH-3013 Bern, Switzerland; Centre d'études nordiques et département de Géographie, Université Laval, Québec (Québec), G1K 7P4, Canada sonjahausmann{at}hotmail.com

A. F. Lotter

Laboratory of Palaeobotany and Palynology, University of Utrecht, Budapestlaan 4, NL-3584 CD Utrecht, The Netherlands

J. F.N. van Leeuwen

Institute of Plant Sciences, University of Bern, Altenbergrain 21, CH-3013 Bern, Switzerland

Ch. Ohlendorf

EAWAG, Überlandstrasse 133, CH-8600 Dübendorf, Switzerland; Institut für Geographie, Celsiusstr. FVG-M, 28359 Bremen, Germany

G. Lemcke

Swiss Re, Mythenquai 50/60, CH-8022 Zürich, Switzerland; Swiss Re Americas, 175 King Street, Armonk, NY 10504, USA

E. Grönlund

University of Joensuu, Karelian Institute, Finland

M. Sturm

EAWAG, Überlandstrasse 133, CH-8600 Dübendorf, Switzerland

This paper presents a multiproxy high-resolution study of the past 2600 years for Seebergsee, a small Swiss lake with varved sediments at the present tree-line ecotone. The laminae were identified as varves by a numerical analysis of diatom counts in the thin-sections. The hypothesis of two diatom blooms per year was corroborated by the 210Pb and 137Cs chronology. A period of intensive pasturing during the ‘Little Ice Age’ between ad 1346 and ad 1595 is suggested by coprophilous fungal spores, as well as by pollen indicators of grazing, by the diatom-inferred total phosphorus, by geochemistry and by documentary data. The subsequent re-oligotrophication of the lake took about 88 years, as determined by the timelag between the decline of coprophile fungal spores and the restoration of pre-eutrophic nutrient conditions. According to previous studies of latewood densities from the same region, cold summers around ad 1600 limited the pasturing at this altitude. This demonstrated the socio-economic impact of a single climatic event. However, the variance partitioning between the effects of land use and climate, which was applied for the whole core, revealed that climate independent of land use and time explained only 1.32% of the diatom data, while land use independent of climate and time explained 15.7%. Clearly land use in‘ uenced the lake, but land use was not always driven by climate. Other factors beside climate, such as politics or the introduction of fertilizers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also in‘ uenced the development of Alpine pasturing.

Key Words: Varves • climate • land use • eutrophication • baseline conditions • transfer function • multi-proxy approach • diatoms • pollen • Alps • Switzerland • ‘Little Ice Age’ • late Holocene

The Holocene, Vol. 12, No. 3, 279-289 (2002)
DOI: 10.1191/0959683602hl544rp


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