Boris K Biskaborn

• Dr. rer. nat.
• Scientist at Potsdam

The Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost (GTN-P) provides the first dynamic database associated with the Thermal State of Permafrost (TSP) and the Circumpolar Active Layer Monitoring (CALM) programs, which extensively collect permafrost temperature and active layer thickness (ALT) data from Arctic, Antarctic and mountain permafrost regions. Th...

Although the climate development over the Holocene in the Northern Hemisphere is well known, palaeolimnological climate reconstructions reveal spatiotemporal variability in northern Eurasia. Here we present a multi-proxy study from north-eastern Siberia combining sediment geochemistry, and diatom and pollen data from lake-sediment cores covering th...

Siberian larch forests growing on shallow permafrost soils have not, until now, been considered to be controlling the abiotic and biotic characteristics of the vast number of thaw-lake ecosystems. Here we show, using four independent data sets (a modern data set from 201 lakes from the tundra to taiga, and three lake-core records), that lake-water...

In northeastern Siberia, Russia, a 1.2 m sediment core was retrieved and radiocarbon dated from a small and shallow lake located at the western side of the lower Lena River (N 69°24′, E 123°50′, 81 m a.s.l.). The objective of this paper is to reconstruct the palaeoenvironmental variability and to infer major palaeoclimate trends that have occurred...

The relationships between thermokarst activity, limnogeological processes and climate change in the Siberian Arctic are not well understood. The objective of this paper is to identify the factors controlling the patterns of deposition, using grain size distribution, organic content, elemental composition and mineralogical composition of a 137-cm lo...

Lake ecosystems are affected globally by climate warming and anthropogenic influences. However, impacts on boreal lake ecosystems in eastern Siberia remain underexplored. Our aim is to determine if shifts in diatom assemblages in a remote lake in eastern Siberia are related to climate warming, similar to observations in temperate regions, while als...

During the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, the dominant mammoth steppe ecosystem across northern Eurasia vanished, in parallel with megafauna extinctions. However, plant extinction patterns are rarely detected due to lack of identifiable fossil records. Here, we introduce a method for detection of plant taxa loss at regional (extirpation) to poten...

Eurasian permafrost soils contain large amounts of organic carbon (OC) and mercury (Hg), sequestered by vegetation during past and present interglacial periods. Lake sediment archives may help understand past OC and Hg dynamics and how they interact with climate‐related variables. We investigated Hg accumulation, OC dynamics, and Hg and OC stable i...

Only a few palaeo-records extend beyond the Holocene in Yakutia, eastern Siberia, since most of the lakes in the region are of Holocene thermokarst origin. Thus, we have a poor understanding of the long-term interactions between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and their response to climate change. The Lake Khamra region in southwestern Yakutia i...

Climate seasonality critically influences the functioning and dynamics of ecosystems in continental areas. The ecological importance of winter temperatures on high-latitude vegetation changes has recently been argued to be largely overlooked in comparison to summer temperatures. The Oymyakon region from eastern Siberia, with its strong continentali...

Northern latitudes have been significantly impacted by recent climate warming, which has increased the probability of experiencing extreme weather events. To comprehensively understand hydroclimate change and reconstruct hydroclimatic anomalies such as drought periods, appropriate proxy records reaching further back in time beyond meteorological me...

In recent decades, climate change and other anthropogenic activities have substantially affected groundwater systems worldwide. These impacts include changes in groundwater recharge, discharge, flow, storage, and distribution. Climate-induced shifts are evident in altered recharge rates, greater groundwater contribution to streamflow in glacierized...

Oxygen isotopes in biogenic silica (δ18OBSi) from lake sediments allow for quantitative reconstruction of past hydroclimate and proxy-model comparison in terrestrial environments. The signals of individual records have been attributed to different factors, such as air temperature (Tair), atmospheric circulation patterns, hydrological changes, and l...

Northern latitudes have been significantly impacted by recent climate warming, which has increased the probability of experiencing extreme weather events. To comprehensively understand hydroclimate change and reconstruct extreme events such as droughts or floods, appropriate proxy records reaching further back in time are needed beyond meteorologic...

Eurasian permafrost soils contain large amounts of organic carbon (OC) and mercury (Hg), sequestered by vegetation during past and present interglacial periods. Lake sediment archives may help understand past OC and Hg dynamics and how they interact with climate-related variables. We investigated Hg accumulation, OC dynamics, and Hg and OC stable i...

Introduction: Rising industrial emissions of carbon dioxide and methane highlight the important role of carbon sinks and sources in fast-changing northern landscapes. Northern lake systems play a key role in regulating organic carbon input by accumulating carbon in their sediment. Here we look at the lake history of 28 lakes (between 50°N and 80°N)...

The marine habitat beneath Antarctica's ice shelves spans ~1.6 million km2, and life in this vast and extreme environment is among Earth's least accessible, least disturbed and least known, yet likely to be impacted by climate-forced warming and environmental change. Although competition among biota is a fundamental structuring force of ecological...

In Central Yakutia (Siberia) livelihoods of local communities depend on alaas (thermokarst depression) landscapes and the lakes within. Development and dynamics of these alaas lakes are closely connected to climate change, permafrost thawing, catchment conditions, and land use. To reconstruct lake development throughout the Holocene we analyze sedi...

This study is based on multiproxy data gained from a 14C-dated 6.5 m long sediment core and a 210Pb-dated 23 cm short core retrieved from Lake Rauchuagytgyn in Chukotka, Arctic Russia. Our main objectives are to reconstruct the environmental history and ecological development of the lake during the last 29 kyr and to investigate the main drivers be...

Using pollen analysis and metabarcoding of plant sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNa), we infer the floristic diversity in the vicinity of Lake Balyktukel, Ulagan Plateau, the Altai Mountains, over the last 7 kyr. The SedaDNA method identified 200% more taxa than found by morphological pollen analysis. In particular, it revealed that the dominant tree...

Thermokarst lagoons represent the transition state from a freshwater lacustrine to a marine environment, and receive little attention regarding their role for greenhouse gas production and release in Arctic permafrost landscapes. We studied the fate of methane (CH4) in sediments of a thermokarst lagoon in comparison to two thermokarst lakes on the...

Oxygen isotopes in biogenic silica (δ18OBSi) from lake sediments allow for quantitative reconstruction of past hydroclimate and proxy–model comparison in terrestrial environments. The signals of individual records have been attributed to different factors, such as air temperature (Tair), atmospheric circulation patterns, hydrological changes and la...

Using pollen analysis and metabarcoding of plant sedimentary ancient DNA, we establish the floristic diversity in the vicinity of Lake Balyktukel, Ulagan Plateau, the Altai Mountains, over the last 7 kyr. Analysis of plant DNA from lake bottom sediments is used for the first time to characterize the past vegetation of the Altai Mountains. The sedim...

Climate change has a major impact on arctic and boreal terrestrial ecosystems as warming leads to northward treeline shifts, inducing consequences for heterotrophic organisms associated with the plant taxa. To unravel ecological dependencies, we address how long-term climatic changes have shaped the co-occurrence of plants and fungi across selected...

This study is based on multiproxy data gained from a 14C-dated 6.5 m long sediment core and a 210Pb-dated 23 cm short core retrieved from Lake Rauchuagytgyn in Chukotka, Arctic Russia. The main objectives are to reconstruct the environmental history and ecological development of the lake during the last 29k years and to investigate the main drivers...

Permafrost temperatures are increasing globally with the potential of adverse environmental and socio-economic impacts. Nonetheless, the attribution of observed permafrost warming to anthropogenic climate change has relied mostly on qualitative evidence. Here, we compare long permafrost temperature records from 15 boreholes in the northern hemisphe...

The Holocene environmental history of NE Germany is strongly influenced by postglacial climate development, paraglacial processes, and in more recent times by human activities. The objective of this study is to infer millennial-scale natural and man-made palaeoenvironmental variability in the Groß-Glienicker lake system. The study was initiated by...

Thermokarst lagoons represent the transition state from a freshwater lacustrine to a marine environment, and receive little attention regarding their role for greenhouse gas production and release in Arctic permafrost landscapes. We studied the fate of methane (CH 4 ) in sediments of a thermokarst lagoon in comparison to two thermokarst lakes on th...

Climate change is expected to cause major shifts in boreal forests which are in vast areas of Siberia dominated by two species of the deciduous needle tree larch ( Larix ). The species differ markedly in their ecosystem functions, thus shifts in their respective ranges are of global relevance. However, drivers of species distribution are not well u...

Age–depth relationships are the key elements in paleoenvironmental studies to place proxy measurements into a temporal context. However, potential influencing factors of the available radiocarbon data and the associated modeling process can cause serious divergences of age–depth relationships from true chronologies, which is particularly challengin...

The Pan-Eurasian Experiment (PEEX) Science Plan, released in 2015, addressed a need for a holistic system understanding and outlined the most urgent research needs for the rapidly changing Arctic-boreal region. Air quality in China, together with the long-range transport of atmospheric pollutants, was also indicated as one of the most crucial topic...

This pilot study presents surface sediment diatom assemblages in four alpine lakes in the Zelengora Mountains. The four lakes are distributed across an alpine treeline, spanning temperate mixed forest and treeless alpine tundra zones, thus offering an excellent opportunity to study the interaction of physicochemical properties and biotic communitie...

Although sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA) is increasingly used to reconstruct past ecosystem changes, we do not yet know much about its preservation conditions across geological time, resulting in potential biases and uncertainties in data interpretation. In this study, we obtained sedaDNA records from around 15 lakes from the Arctic and sub-Arcti...

A marine sediment record from the central Bering Sea, spanning the last 20 thousand years (ka), was studied to unravel the depositional history with regard to terrigenous sediment supply and biogenic sedimentation. Methodic approaches comprised the inference of accumulation rates of siliciclastic and biogenic components, grain-size analysis, and (c...

Age-depth correlations are the key elements in paleoenvironmental studies to place proxy measurements into a temporal context. However, potential influencing factors of the available radiocarbon data and the associated modeling process can cause serious divergences of age-depth correlations from true chronologies, which is particularly challenging...

Where polar ice sheets meet the coast, they can flow into the sea as floating ice shelves. The seabed underneath is in complete darkness, and may be Earth’s least known surface habitat. Few taxa there have been fully identified to named species (see Supplemental information) — remarkable for a habitat spanning nearly 1.6 million km ² • Kim S. Com...

A multi-proxy paleolimnological analysis of a sediment core sequence from Lake Malaya Chabyda in Central Yakutia (Eastern Siberia, Russia) was conducted to investigate changes in lake processes, including lake development, sediment and organic carbon accumulation, and changes in primary productivity, within the context of Late Pleistocene and Holoc...

Climate change has a major impact on arctic and boreal terrestrial ecosystems as warming leads to northward treeline shifts, inducing consequences for heterotrophic organisms associated with the plant taxa. To unravel ecological dependencies, we address how long-term climatic changes have shaped the palaeo-ecosystems at selected sites in Siberia. W...

Lakes act as important sinks for inorganic and organic sediment components. However, investigations of sedimentary carbon budgets within glacial lakes are currently absent from Arctic Siberia. The aim of this paper is to provide the first reconstruction of accumulation rates, sediment and carbon budgets from a lacustrine sediment core from Lake Rau...

Millennial-scale climate change history in eastern Siberia and relationships between diatom diversity, paleoclimate, and sediment-geochemical lake system trajectories are still poorly understood. This study investigates multi-proxy time series reaching back to the Late Pleistocene derived from radiocarbon dated Lake Bolshoe Toko sediment cores, sou...

When performing spatial-temporal investigations of multiple lake systems, geoscientists face the challenge of dealing with complex and heterogeneous data of different types, structure, and format. To support comparability, it is necessary to transform such data into a uniform format that ensures syntactic and semantic comparability. This paper pres...

Permafrost region subsurface organic carbon (OC) pools are a major component of the terrestrial carbon cycle and vulnerable to a warming climate. Thermokarst lagoons are an important transition stage with complex depositional histories during which permafrost and lacustrine carbon pools are transformed along eroding Arctic coasts. The effects of te...

Wildfires, as a key disturbance in forest ecosystems, are shaping the world's boreal landscapes. Changes in fire regimes are closely linked to a wide array of environmental factors, such as vegetation composition, climate change, and human activity. Arctic and boreal regions and, in particular, Siberian boreal forests are experiencing rising air an...

The Pan-Eurasian Experiment (PEEX) Science Plan, released in 2015, addressed a need for a holistic system understanding and outlined the most urgent research needs for sustainable development in the Artic-boreal region. Air quality in China and long-range transport of the atmospheric pollutants was also indicated as one of the most crucial topics o...

A new dataset from Lake Emanda provides insights into climate and environmental dynamics in an extreme continental setting in northeastern Siberia. The δ¹⁸Odiatom record is supported by diatom assemblage analysis, modern isotope hydrology and atmospheric circulation patterns. The data reveal a relatively cold oligotrophic freshwater lake system per...

The Kuril Islands stretch southwest from Kamchatka, Russia, to Hokkaido, Japan and separate the Sea of Okhotsk from the northern Pacific Ocean. A series of transgressions and regressions linked to variations in climatically affected global ice volume are among the most important drivers of Holocene environmental changes in the region. Despite a lon...

This paper examines a 115 cm long profile section of lacustrine-swamp sediments from the Langou I Bay (eastern part of Primorsky Krai; 44°25′10.16″ N, 135°54′26.08″ E). According to the produced age model, the sediments are 3900 years old. A multiproxy study involving geochemical, chironomid, diatom, and palynological analysis indicates that the cl...

Lake systems play a central role in broadening our knowledge about future trends in the Arctic, as their sediments store information on interactions between climate change, lake ontogeny, external abiotic sediment input, and biodiversity changes. In order to make reliable statements about future lake trajectories, we need sound multi-proxy data fro...

Relationships between climate, species composition, and species richness are of particular importance for understanding how boreal ecosystems will respond to ongoing climate change. This study aims to reconstruct changes in terrestrial vegetation composition and taxa richness during the glacial Late Pleistocene and the interglacial Holocene in the...

This paper presents two new pollen records and quantitative climate reconstructions from northern Chukotka documenting environmental changes over the last 27.9 ka. Open tundra‐ and steppe‐like habitats dominated between 27.9 and 18.7 cal. ka BP. Betula and Alnus shrubs might have grown in sheltered microhabitats but disappeared after 18.7 cal. ka B...

The thermokarst lakes of permafrost regions play a major role in the global carbon cycle. These lakes are sources of methane to the atmosphere although the methane flux is restricted by an ice cover for most of the year. How methane concentrations and fluxes in these waters are affected by the presence of an ice cover is poorly understood. To relat...

Lakes act as important sinks for inorganic and organic sediment components. However, investigations of sedimentary carbon budgets within glacial lakes are currently absent from Arctic Siberia. The aim of this paper is to provide the first reconstruction of accumulation rates, sediment and carbon budgets from a lacustrine sediment core from Lake Rau...

An outreach article discussing the major findings of Biskaborn et al., 2021 regarding the impacts of climate change and industrialisation to remote Siberian lakes published to the Earth System Knowledge Platform (ESKP).

Industrialization in the Northern Hemisphere has led to warming and pollution of natural ecosystems. We used paleolimnological methods to explore whether recent climate change and/or pollution had affected a very remote lake ecosystem, i.e. one without nearby direct human influence. We compared sediment samples that date from before and after the o...

Wildfires, as a key disturbance in forest ecosystems, are shaping the world’s boreal landscapes. Changes in fire regimes are closely linked to a wide array of environmental factors, such as vegetation composition, climate change, and human activity. Arctic and boreal regions and, in particular, Siberian boreal forests are experiencing rising air an...

As the Arctic coast erodes, it drains thermokarst lakes, transforming them into lagoons, and, eventually, integrates them into subsea permafrost. Lagoons represent the first stage of a thermokarst lake transition to a marine setting and possibly more saline and colder upper boundary conditions. In this research, borehole data, electrical resistivit...

Lakes cover large parts of the climatically sensitive Arctic landscape and respond rapidly to environmental change. Arctic lakes have different origins and include the predominant thermokarst lakes, which are small, young and highly dynamic, as well as large, old and stable glacial lakes. Freshwater diatoms dominate the primary producer community i...

Palaeoenvironmental reconstructions with temporal coverages extending beyond Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) three are scarce within the data sparse region of Chukotka, Far East Russia. The objective of this paper is to infer palaeoenvironmental variability from a 10.76 m long, OSL-and 14 C-dated sediment core from Lake Ilirney, Chukotka (67 21 0 N, 168...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Rapid permafrost thaw by thermokarst mobilizes previously frozen organic matter (OM) down to tens of meters deep within decades to centuries, leading to microbial degradation and greenhouse gas release. Late Pleistocene ice-rich Yedoma deposits that thaw underneath thermokarst lakes and refreeze after lake drainage are called taberal sediments. Alt...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Large, old and heterogenous lake systems are valuable sources of biodiversity. The analysis of current spatial variability within such lakes increases our understanding of the origin and establishment of biodiversity. The environmental sensitivity and the high taxonomic richness of diatoms make them ideal organisms to investigate intra-lake variabi...

A comprehensive database of paleoclimate records is needed to place recent warming into the longer-term context of natural climate variability. We present a global compilation of quality-controlled, published, temperature-sensitive proxy records extending back 12,000 years through the Holocene. Data were compiled from 679 sites where time series co...

Abstract. The thermokarst lakes of permafrost regions play a major role in the global carbon cycle. These lakes are sources of methane to the atmosphere but the methane flux is restricted by an ice cover for most of the year. We provide insights into the methane pathways in the winter ice cover on three different water bodies in a continuous permaf...

Rapidly changing climate in the Northern Hemisphere and associated socio-economic impacts require reliable understanding of lake systems as important freshwater resources and sensitive sentinels of environmental change. To better understand time-series data in lake sediment cores, it is necessary to gain information on within-lake spatial variabili...

Coring sediments in subglacial aquatic environments offers unique opportunities for research on paleo-environments and paleo-climates because it can provide data from periods even earlier than ice cores, as well as the overlying ice histories, interactions between ice and the water system, life forms in extreme habitats, sedimentology, and stratigr...

Rapidly changing climate in the northern hemisphere and associated socio-economic impacts require reliable understanding of lake systems as important freshwater resources and sensitive sentinels of environmental changes. To better understand time-series data in lake sediment cores it is necessary to gain information on within-lake spatial variabili...

Worldwide permafrost temperatures rose on average by 0.30°C over a ten year period from 2007 to 2016 most notably in the Russia North. Permafrost warming has drastic consequences for global climate but also for infrastructure in arctic communities and for the livelihood of the four million people that live there. 17% of the Earths land surface are...

Permafrost warming has the potential to amplify global climate change, because when frozen sediments thaw it unlocks soil organic carbon. Yet to date, no globally consistent assessment of permafrost temperature change has been compiled. Here we use a global data set of permafrost temperature time series from the Global Terrestrial Network for Perma...

Permafrost ecosystems occupy a quarter of the land surface in the Northern Hemisphere. Ongoing rapid temperature change in these areas causes permafrost warming in the Arctic and thawing in the Subarctic regions (Romanovsky et al. Permafr Periglac Process 21:106–116 2010).

We investigated a well-dated sediment section of a palaeolake situated in the coastal zone of Shikotan Island (Lesser Kurils) for organic sediment-geochemistry and biotic components (diatoms, chironomids, pollen) in order to provide a reconstruction of the palaeoenvironmental changes and palaeo-events (tsunamis, sea-level fluctuations and landslide...

Permafrost is recognized as Essential Climate Variable (ECV) within the Global Climate Observing System of UN and ICSU organisations. The Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost (GTN-P) is the primary international programme concerned with long-term monitoring of permafrost. The core mission of the GTN-P is sustained comprehensive long-term monit...

We present results of analyses on a sediment core from Lake Karakul, located in the eastern Pamir Mountains, Tajikistan. The core spans the last textasciitilde29 cal ka. We investigated and assessed processes internal and external to the lake to infer changes in past moisture availability. Among the variables used to infer lake-external processes,...