Enlou Zhang

• Chinese Academy of Sciences

The ongoing climate warming has been casting unprecedented impacts on alpine ecosystems within the Hengduan Mountain (HDM), a globally renowned biodiversity hotspot. However, current knowledge of how alpine vegetation and plant diversity are responding to recent climate warming remains inadequate. Here, we conducted pollen and sedimentary ancient D...

Freshwater ecosystems have been degraded under the recent impacts of global warming and human activities. Reducing external nutrient loadings is the primary strategy for restoring lake state and ecosystem services, but overlooking the impact of warming may hinder its long-term effectiveness. In order to investigate such an impact, this study sim...

Mountainous precipitation has different characteristics due to differences in climatic or topographical backgrounds. However, the variation characteristics of modern precipitation in the Nanling Mountains, which are located at the front edge of the Asian summer monsoon, remain poorly understood. Based on monthly precipitation data from twenty-two m...

Holocene climate change’s impact on ecosystems has attracted considerable interest. Although human activities increasingly influenced ecosystems during the Holocene, many paleo-records primarily reconstruct natural environmental changes, often neglecting the pre-instrumental human influenceon ecological responses. To understand ecosystem responses...

Climate and human activity are two important factors in regulating organic matter (OM) accumulation in the lake environment. However, when and how anthropogenic impacts have affected lacustrine OM accumulation in southwest China during the late Holocene have not yet been well defined. Here, a 16.3-kyr n-alkane record derived from Erhai Lake was use...

In paleolimnology, ecological trajectories of biological communities are typically reconstructed using a sediment core from the deepest part of a lake. However, the representativeness of chironomid assemblages from the profundal zone and its influence on ecological response to environmental change in large, deep lakes remain poorly understood. To a...

The areas affected by the East and South Asian monsoons contain almost half the world’s population. Understanding natural variability in these monsoons under warmer climates is critical for managing future changes. Here we present a high-resolution record of Holocene drought events derived from lake level changes in the South Asian monsoon region....

Aim Over the last century, lakes all over the world have experienced significant eutrophication and become more susceptible to critical transitions. This has prompted a growing need to understand how community dynamics shift following ecological perturbations. This study aims to elucidate the present status, spatial patterns and determinants of bio...

Lakes on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP) have been subject to multiple environmental pressures from rapid climate change and intensified human activity in recent decades. However, their ecological effects on the lake ecosystem remain largely unclear due to the lack of long-term monitoring data. This study presented the environmental and ecological...

Anthropogenic disturbances and climate change have significantly altered the biotic composition across many ecosystems, leading to changes in biodiversity and even ecological collapse. An ecosystem comprises multiple trophic levels, and the issue how these disturbances affect their assembly processes remains unclear. Ecological stability of assembl...

Aim The widely observed positive response of productivity to biodiversity, known as the biodiversity‐productivity relationship (BPR), underpins nature‐based solutions for mitigating and adapting to global changes. Little is known of the role of such emergent processes in the restoration of damaged ecosystems. Here, we test for evidence of a BPR in...

As the main global terrestrial ecosystem component, grasslands are extremely sensitive to global climate change. With increasing human activities over the last century, grassland ecosystems have been degraded to different degrees. However, the evolution of lake-grassland ecosystems in recent centuries remains unclear due to the dearth of high-resol...

Dust deposition in northeastern Asia since the Last Glacial Maximum has previously been studied using a variety of archives. However, the mechanisms driving variability in dust are less well constrained. Here, we present records of the Nd‐Sr isotope and major element composition of sediments from Lake Tuofengling, a crater lake located in northeast...

In recent decades, lakes in arid and semi-arid regions of northern China have been rapidly shrinking, threatening the area's ecological security. However, the impacts of climate change and human activities on lake shrinkage remains unclear due to short instrumental records and a lack of long-term lake-level change records. To address this issue, we...

The main aim of this study was to curate a COI barcode library of Chironomidae from the Tibetan Plateau (TP) as an essential supplement to the public database. Another aim is to evaluate the current status of the public database of Chironomidae in aspects of taxonomic coverage, geographic representation, barcode quality, and efficiency for molecula...

Lakes are important carbon sinks in terrestrial environments. However, the estimation of the global lake carbon sink has large uncertainty. Data from plateau and remote lakes are rare, and most studies of carbon sequestration in large lakes have been based on single or a few sediment cores. Here, twenty-five sediment cores were collected by grid sa...

Meltwater Pulse 1A injection into the North Atlantic coincided with the Bølling warming event, despite climate model simulations indicating that the Meltwater Pulse 1A should have inevitably lead to an extreme cooling in the northern hemisphere. However, so far no cooling event has been found in paleoclimate records responding to Meltwater Pulse 1A...

The 4.2 ka event was a widespread abrupt cooling event in the Northern Hemisphere. However, there was a spatially inconsistent hydroclimatic response to the 4.2 ka event in the Asian monsoon region. To further characterize and to determine the origin of this phenomenon, we present a pollen record spanning the interval from 10.7 ka to the present fr...

Various indices based on metal chemical data are used to evaluate pollution and ecological risk, but the consistency of the assessment results is usually unsatisfactory, and it is unclear if the ecological risk from sediment metals is accurately represented in in situ zoobenthos. Herein, the pollution and ecological risk associated with As, Cd, Cr,...

Understanding the potential mechanisms driving the precipitation pattern in the Asian summer monsoon (ASM) area is significant to reconstructing the environmental and hydrological conditions over the past 2000 years. However, robust and consistent conclusions have been hampered by the complex processes controlling the dynamics and diverse interconn...

Simple Summary The Holocene humidity evolution presents spatial heterogeneity in the Mongolian Plateau where multiple circulation systems converged. Inconsistent records of regional environmental evolution affect accurate assessment of lake ecosystems. Chironomid larvae are one of the most abundant benthic invertebrates in lakes. The taxa compositi...

Trace metal (loid) contamination in the atmosphere is widely monitored, but there is a gap in understanding its long-term patterns, especially in North China, which is currently a global contamination hotspot mainly caused by heavy industry emissions and coal combustion. Herein, historical trends of atmospheric As, Cd, Cr, Cu, Hg, Ni, Pb and Zn con...

Lake sediments are important archives of environmental changes and human activities, but the influences of human processes and lake spatial heterogeneity on the sedimentation of trace metals are still poorly understood. Based on 16 sediment cores from Lake Erhai (249 km²), trace metals (including As and Hg) contamination over the past century and t...

Lakes are recognized as critical zones for carbon transformation and storage, and lacustrine sediments sequestrate considerable amounts of organic carbon (OC). Understanding sedimentation processes and OC burial patterns is crucial to clarifying lakes’ role in global carbon cycling. However, OC sedimentation may be quite spatially heterogeneous wit...

Plain Language Summary Dolostone is common in ancient rocks but rare in modern marine sediments, and dolomite is notoriously difficult to synthesize without microbes at room temperature; this is known as the “dolomite problem”. In many studies, microbes have often been associated with dolomite, and synthesis by microbial mediation has succeeded. Ho...

Grasslands are one of the most important terrestrial ecosystems, acting as carbon sinks and thus mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. However, large uncertainties remain regarding the effects of long-term anthropogenic activities on the carbon cycling in grassland ecosystems, due to a dearth of high-resolution records. Here we present an organic ge...

Biodiversity and ecological stability are closely linked, and over recent timescales, anthropogenic impacts have accelerated losses in both from local to global scales. We attempt to show the combined response of diversity and stability of an aquatic community to changes in human activity as a driver. To address this, we measured the diversity and...

Lake ecosystems in arid Central Asia are in crisis due to water abstraction and eutrophication, and it is important to understand their response to combined climate and human impacts. In this study, based on the relationship between modern chironomids and salinity, we studied subfossil chironomid remains in a ∼4550-year sedimentary record from Lake...

The presence of a large altitude gradient makes southwest China an area with among the highest biodiversity in the world. While studies on biodiversity in this region have primarily focused on plant, plankton, and bacterial communities, how diversity of zoobenthos changes along the altitude gradient remains unclear. Based on surveys of water column...

Lake carbon burial is of vital significance in global carbon cycle and carbon budget, particularly in the large deepwater lakes. However, carbon burial in large deepwater lakes is hard to estimate due to the difficulty in obtaining high spatial-resolution samples. In this study, we investigated distributions of total organic carbon (TOC) and inorga...

Inland waterbodies play an important role in the global carbon cycle, acting both as carbon sources with organic carbon (OC) mineralization and as sinks with OC burial in sediments. Under recent impacts of global warming, anthropogenic land-use change and nutrient supply, however, there is a limited knowledge regarding OC dynamics in sediments of l...

Volcanic ash has been widely used as unique independent marker horizons for dating and synchronizing paleoenvironments and archeological records. Here, we report a series of key widespread late Pleistocene to Holocene tephras horizons from a lake sequence in southern China that have significant potential for dating and synchronizing paleoenvironmen...

Total concentration and chemical partitioning of heavy metals are commonly used in environmental quality assessment; however, their comparability and comprehensive application are far less discussed. Herein, bioavailability, pollution and eco-risk of As, Cd, Cr, Cu, Ni, Pb and Zn in surface sediments of Erhai Lake were evaluated referring to multip...

Orbital-scale global climatic changes during the late Quaternary are dominated by high-latitude influenced ∼100,000-year global ice-age cycles and monsoon influenced ∼23,000-year low-latitude hydroclimate variations. However, the shortage of highly-resolved land temperature records remains a limiting factor for achieving a comprehensive understandi...

Over the past decades, paleoenvironmental studies in the Indian summer monsoon region have mainly focused on precipitation change, with few published terrestrial temperature records from the region. We analysed the distribution of isoprenoid glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraethers (isoGDGTs) in the sediments of Lake Chenghai in southwest China across...

We analyzed the taxonomic and functional diversities of chironomid communities on the northern Mongolian Plateau to understand the responses to multiple environmental pressures. The 27 lakes studied were classified into three groups based on significant heterogeneity of habitats. A total of 65 chironomid taxa were identified with the dominant taxa...

We present a branched glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraethers (brGDGTs)–based mean annual temperature reconstruction covering the last millennium from a subtropical lake in Guangxi Province, southern China (23°N). We demonstrate that the pattern and absolute values of mean annual temperatures reconstructed using the eastern African lake brGDGTs calib...

Environment quality of suburban and urban lakes receives special attention due to their great impacted by human perturbations and important roles in ecosystem services. Herein, the spatio-temporal variations of 10 metal and metalloid elements in 13 sediment cores from a large suburban lake (Dianchi) were studied to explore the changes in sedimentar...

Wildfires are sensitive to climate change, but their response to changes in temperature and precipitation on long timescales is still disputed. In this study, we present a ~9.4 ka black carbon mass sedimentation rate (BCMSR) record from Lake Ximenglongtan (XMLT), southwestern China, to elucidate the Holocene fire regime and its linkages to climatic...

Over the past few decades, paleoenvironmental studies in the Indian Summer Monsoon (ISM) region have mainly focused on precipitation change, with few published terrestrial temperature records from the region. We analyzed the distribution of isoprenoid glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraethers (isoGDGTs) in the sediments of Lake Chenghai in southwest Ch...

Identifying variability and the mechanisms driving variability in the Indian summer monsoon (ISM) since the last deglaciation is critical for understanding past hydroclimatic change. In this study, we present an accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon dated record of δ¹⁸O variations in authigenic carbonates derived from Lake Chenghai in southwest...

A continuous sediment record since 12.3 cal ka bp from Lake Wuxu (south‐eastern Tibetan Plateau) was investigated in terms of the Holocene evolution of the Indian Summer Monsoon. The molar C/N ratio and stable C isotope were used to identify the source of the organic matter as well as climate conditions. The evolution of Lake Wuxu was summarized wi...

Lake biodiversity is an incomplete indicator of exogenous forcing insofar as it ignores underlying deformations of community structure. Here, we seek a proxy for deformation in a network of diatom assemblages comprising 452 species in 273 lakes across China. We test predictions from network theory that nodes of similar type will tend to self‐organi...

Organic carbon mineralization and storage in the inland water bodies is an important component of global carbon cycling. However, the mechanisms influencing carbon cycling in the inland water bodies remain uncertain. In this study, n-alkane data from a sediment core spanning the last glacial-interglacial cycle from Lake Xingkai in northeast China,...

Analysis of lake sediment geochemistry is valuable for understanding past hydroclimatic changes via the reconstruction of changes in catchment erosion, chemical weathering, redox processes and the intensity of evaporation. In this study, we analyzed the geochemical composition, magnetic susceptibility and carbonate content of the Holocene sediments...

Here we investigate the sources of branched glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraethers (brGDGTs) in Lake Ximenglongtan from southwestern China and present a brGDGTs-based Holocene (∼9.4 cal kyr BP) temperature reconstruction. The similarities in the distributions of brGDGTs between surface sediments and catchment soils indicate that soil is the dominant...

Understanding biodiversity patterns and the role of biotic attributes in governing these patterns remains one of the most important challenges in ecology. Here, taking water depth in Lake Lugu as a typical geographical gradient, we studied how these different taxa, that is bacteria, diatoms and chironomids, respond to the water depth and environmen...

The responses of the Indian and East Asian summer monsoons (ISM and EASM) to warming since the last deglaciation are controversial. Pollen results from a subalpine lake in the ISM area show that the Tsuga dumosa forest zone migrated at least 650 m upward during 18.6–7.1 kyr BP, indicating a gradual rise in mean annual temperature exceeding 3.9 °C....

We present a sub-centennial resolution summer temperature record from the SE Tibetan Plateau (Tiancai Lake, SW China, 3900 m a.s.l.) derived from a chironomid stratigraphy covering the last c.19.5 ka. The record highlights the interaction between tropical and high-latitude climate forcing through the changes in atmospheric circulation during the la...

Despite the small coverage on the earth, lakes play an important role in the terrestrial carbon cycle. There are a large number of lakes in Xinjiang, Northwest China, where remarkable climate changes and human activity have been undergone over the past decades. Lake Bosten, the largest fresh water inland lake in Northwest China, was selected as the...

Organic carbon (OC) burial in lake sediments plays important roles in the terrestrial carbon cycle and global carbon balance. Lake Erhai is the second largest freshwater lake in the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau. There have been many studies on the changes in the lake ecological environment and pollution of trace metals and nutrients, but limited knowledg...

In this study, we present the element geochemical data of Core XK08-A2 drilled from Lake Xingkai (Khanka), northeast China. The study aims to examine the changes of sediment provenance and geochemical composition in response to Asian summer monsoon variability since the last interglacial period. Major elemental analyses on lacustrine samples and sa...

Snowfall is an important component of Earth's climate system; however, long, continuous high-resolution records of global snowfall are lacking because of the absence of suitable proxies. In this study, diatom record from the sediments of Yunlong Lake, in the southeastern Tibetan Plateau, was used to reconstruct snowfall during the Younger Dryas (YD...

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are toxic organic pollutants which present and persist ubiquitously in the natural environment. We present a sedimentary record of the 16 priority PAHs pollutants from Lake Baxian, a small freshwater lake in a remote area of southern China, spanning the last ca. 60 years. The concentration of PAHs in the sedi...

As global changes begin to affect the biosphere profoundly, the impacts on ecosystem health will become more significant. Understanding the sequence of functional species loss along an environmental or ecological gradient remains a research priority for ecosystem conservation. In this paper, nestedness, β-diversity and its components in diatom comm...

In this study, we present the element geochemical data of Core XK08-A2 drilled from Lake Xingkai (Khanka), northeast China. The study aims to examine the changes of sediment provenance and geochemical composition in response to Asian summer monsoon variability since the last interglacial period. Major elemental analyses on lacustrine samples and sa...

Lacustrine ecosystems are directly influenced by terrestrial soil erosion, and excessive sediment loading constitutes a significant and widespread environmental issue. In order to investigate the response of catchment soil erosion and organic carbon burial to climate change and human activity, a sediment core spanning the last 160 years was retriev...

Yunnan province is rich in biodiversity and is critical for providing ecosystem services. Human disturbances and climate change in recent decades have put the ecosystem under stress, making it urgent to study biodiversity and stability of this region. Here, sediment records covering 1820s-2006 were collected from Lake Yangzong and were used to expl...

Sedimentary records of inorganic elements and pigments over the last 12,000 years are used to assess major changes in limnological conditions of Tiancai Lake (a small treeline lake, SW China), in response to Holocene climate variations. Algal communities shifted from the dominance of cyanobacteria and cryptophytes in the early Holocene, towards sil...

The stable carbon isotopic composition of organic matter of aeolian silt deposits is regarded as an appropriate proxy index of paleovegetation, especially in the Chinese Loess Plateau in central China. In this study, a loess-paleosol sequence in the southeastern Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in northeastern (NE) China, which is located outside t...

We present a sediment record from Lugu Lake, a large and deep alpine lake in southwestern China, spanning the last c.2500 cal yr BP. This multi-proxy study focussed on subfossil chironomids but also included analyses of chemical elements using inductively coupled plasma-atomic emission spectrometry (ICP-AES), magnetic susceptibility, total organic...

The reference condition and historical variability of aquatic ecosystems are key ecological characteristics for understanding the ecological environmental protection and lake ecosystem restoration. Based on chironomid records from 32 lakes in the Jianghan floodplain, this study aims to determine their ecological, chemical reference conditions and t...

Understanding the changes in monsoon intensity and ecosystem response at different timescales is crucial for the well-being of humans, yet the paleoclimatic interpretation of stable carbon isotope (δ¹³C) values from northeast China records is debatable. In this study, reported δ¹³C data from 76 surface soils in northeast China are compiled, and a δ...

Investigating potential forcing mechanisms of terrestrial summer temperature changes from the Asian summer monsoon influenced area is of importance to better understand the climate variability in these densely populated regions. The results of spectral and wavelet analyses of the published chironomid reconstructed mean July temperature data from Ti...

Diatom in the volcanic lake provides proxy evidence for pH changes that are characterized by variations in the percentage of acidophilous diatom species. The information regarding the hydrology of the lake, derived from a previous publication and survey of one year on the lake, indicate that pH is low during the wet season and higher during the dry...

Pyrogenic carbon (PyC) and n-alkane data from sediments in the northern South China Sea reveal variations in material from C4 plants in East Asia over the last ~19 Ma. These data indicate the likely presence of C4 taxa during the earliest part of the record analysed, with C4 species also prominent during the mid and late Miocene and especially the...

Several organic phosphorus compounds (Po) in sediment from a representative eutrophic lake were surveyed using a sequential fractionation procedure, which included microbial biomass phosphorus (Biomass-P), fulvic acid phosphorus (FA-P), humic acid phosphorus (HU-P), and residual phosphorus (Res-P). In addition, several organic compounds including o...

A 336-cm-long sediment core spanning the last 130 ka was recovered from Lake Xingkai on the northeastern margin of the East Asian summer monsoon domain to reveal the linkage between lacustrine depositional processes and environmental changes. Bayesian end member modeling analysis was conducted to partition and interpret the grain-size distributions...

Atmospheric pollution, one of the leading environmental problems in South and East Asia, and its impact on the terrestrial environmental quality remain poorly understood particularly in alpine areas where both historical and present-day mining and smelting operations might leave an imprint. Here, we reconstructed atmospheric trace metals pollution...

Contents of Al, Fe, Mn, Zn, Cr, Co, Ni, Cu, As, Cd and Pb in the surface and core sediments of Lake Yangzonghai were determined. Combined with geochronology, the heavy metal spatio-temporal characteristics, the status relative to the pre-industrial levels, and potential ecological risk of the pollution were evaluated by the surface and core sedimen...

Estuarine sediment is an important carbon reservoir, and thus may play an important role in the global carbon cycle. The Yellow River Estuary is a large estuary in northern China, having implications for the Bohai Sea's carbon cycle. However, little is known about carbon dynamics in the sediment of the transitional zone near the river mouth. In thi...

Multi-proxy, including total nitrogen (TN), total organic carbon (TOC), black carbon (BC) and its stable carbon isotope (δ¹³CBC), were analyzed in the 40 cm sediment core from Lake Yangzong in Kunming city,Yunnan province. The sediment core was dated using ¹³⁷Cs and ²¹⁰Pb, and then we discussed the deposition processes of TOC and BC responding to h...

High-resolution pollen and charcoal records from Chenghai Lake, northwestern Yunnan Province of China, are presented in this study. These records reveal changes in climate and human activity since 8220 cal. yr BP, and the drivers of climatic change are further discussed based on spectral analysis of Tsuga and evergreen oak pollen percentages. The p...

This paper reports the first quantitative summer (mean July) temperature reconstruction based on subfossil chironomids from the southeast margin of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) covering the end of the last deglaciation and the entire Holocene, spanning 11,800 cal yr BP to the present. The record is based on 223 chironomid samples throughout a...

We present a quantitative mean July temperature record spanning the last c. 5000 years from an alpine lake in south-western China. The reconstruction is based on the application of an established chironomid-based inference model using 100 lakes from the region. The reconstructed summer temperature changes are within 2.4°C of modern throughout the r...

The climate pattern has shifted from the warm-dry to warm-wet conditions in the arid northwestern China since 1980s. Changes in ice melting and precipitation in alpine areas caused by this climatic change can alter wetland hydrological processes, which in turn have an effect on biological habitats and ecosystem functions. Together with local instru...