Johan Rydberg

Umeå University | UMU · Department of Ecology and Environmental Science

Ecosystems are continuously responding to both natural and anthropogenic environmental change. Lake sediments preserve local and global evidence of these ecological transitions through time. This archived information can yield crucial insights through the reconstruction of past changes over hundreds to many thousands of years. This chapter provides...

Bioavailable nitrogen (N) controls marine biological productivity and thus the capacity of the global ocean to sequester atmospheric CO 2 in the abyss through the production and remineralization of sinking algal organic matter. In lakes, high concentrations of bioavailable N cause eutrophication, increased algal growth, and in turn oxygen loss. Pas...

Since the seminal paper in 1998 (Coolen and Overmann), sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA) has become a powerful tool in paleoecology to reconstruct past changes in terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity. Still, sedaDNA is an emerging tool and there is a need for calibrations and validations to ensure the reliability of sedaDNA as a proxy to reconstruc...

On the annual and interannual scales, lake microbial communities are known to be heavily influenced by environmental conditions both in the lake and in its terrestrial surroundings. However , the influence of landscape setting and environmental change on shaping these communities over a longer (millennial) timescale is rarely studied. Here, we appl...

The use of lake sedimentary DNA to track the long-term changes in both terrestrial and aquatic biota is a rapidly advancing field in paleoecological research. Although largely applied nowadays, knowledge gaps remain in this field and there is therefore still research to be conducted to ensure the reliability of the sedimentary DNA signal. Building...

Chlorophyll is frequently used as a proxy for autochthonous production in lakes. This use of chlorophyll concentrations in sediments to infer historical changes in lake primary production relies heavily on the assumption that preservation is sufficient to reflect the productivity in a meaningful way. In this study, we use a series of freeze cores f...

We present a high-resolution peat paleodust record (peat accumulation rate (PAR), mineralogy and elemental content) spanning the last 8300 years from Draftinge Mosse (400 ha), southern Sweden (57°06′27.6”N 13°42′54.1″E). Five periods of increased mineral deposition were recorded, the first event occurred between ~6280 and ~5570 cal BP, during the f...

Climate change is predicted to have far reaching consequences for the mobility of carbon in arctic landscapes. On a regional scale, carbon cycling is highly dependent on interactions between terrestrial and aquatic parts of a catchment. Despite this, studies that integrate the terrestrial and aquatic systems and study entire catchments using site-s...

The temporal trajectory of lake microbial communities is still rarely investigated over timescales that encompass the full history of an aquatic ecosystem and, therefore, its response to global or local long-term environmental changes. Thanks to the development of molecularbased procedures in paleoecology, it is today possible to assess changes in...

Severe winter windstorms have become an increasingly common occurrence over recent decades in northwestern Europe. Although there exists considerable uncertainty, storminess is projected to increase in the future. On centennial to millennial time scales in particular, the mechanisms forcing storminess remain unsettled. We contribute to available pa...

To assess the sensitivity of lakes to anthropogenically-driven environmental changes (e.g., nutrient supply, climate change), it is necessary to first isolate the effects of between-year variability in weather conditions. This variability can strongly impact a lake's biological community especially in boreal and arctic areas where snow phenology pl...

The history of mining and smelting and the associated pollution have been documented using lake sediments for decades, but the broader ecological implications are not well studied. We analyzed sediment profiles covering the past ~10,000 years from three lakes associated with an iron blast furnace in central Sweden, as an example of the many small-s...

Field studies at a periglacial site (Two Boat Lake) in West Greenland

The eastern Lesotho highlands are of considerable hydrological importance to southern Africa as a so-called ‘water tower’ for the surrounding region. Here, we contribute proxy-data inferring climate and vegetation changes over the past 1600 years, assessing in parallel inorganic and organic chemical analyses on a sediment core from Ladybird wetland...

Climate change is a key driver of changes in lakes, especially in northern ecosystems. The structure, composition and metabolism of aquatic communities may be highly sensitive to climate-driven weather variability with possible negative effects on lake functioning and ecosystem services. Ice-covered lakes are particularly interesting because of the...

Peatlands in northern latitudes sequester one third of the world's soil organic carbon. Mineral dusts can affect the primary productivity of terrestrial systems through nutrient transport but this process has not yet been documented in these peat-rich regions. Here we analysed organic and inorganic fractions of an 8900-year-old sequence from Store...

Biological proxies from the Sokli Eemian (Marine Isotope Stage 5e) paleolake sequence from northeast Finland have previously shown that, unlike many postglacial records from boreal sites, the lake becomes increasingly eutrophic over time. Here, principal components (PC) were extracted from a high resolution multi-element XRF core scanning dataset t...

Detection of DNA in lake sediments holds promise as a tool to study processes like extinction, colonization, adaptation and evolutionary divergence. However, low concentrations make sediment DNA difficult to detect, leading to high false negative rates. Additionally, contamination could potentially lead to high false positive rates. Careful laborat...

The composition of sediment organic matter (OM) exerts a strong control on biogeochemical processes in lakes, such as those involved in the fate of carbon, nutrients and trace metals. While between-lake spatial variability of OM quality is increasingly investigated, we explored in this study how the molecular composition of sediment OM varies spati...

Historical documents, archaeological evidence and lake-sediment records indicate thus far that significant mining of iron and copper ores in the Berglsagen mining region in central Sweden did not begin until the late 12th century – first with iron in Norberg – and thereafter spreading rapidly throughout the region during the 13th century when also...

There is an ongoing debate on the fate of mercury (Hg) in areas affected by artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM). Over the last 30 years, ASGM has released 69 tons of Hg into the southeastern Peruvian Amazon. To investigate the role of suspended matter and hydrological factors on the fate of ASGM-Hg, we analysed riverbank sediments and susp...

Recent studies of bloomery sites in Sweden indicate the amount of iron produced with this early low-technology smelter was greater than previously thought, which implies greater economic importance. Little is known about the history of bloomery technology, not least the timeframe over which individual bloomeries were operated, as well as their impa...

The composition of organic matter (OM) exerts a strong control on biogeochemical processes in lakes, such as for carbon, nutrients and trace metals. While between-lake spatial variability of OM quality is increasingly investigated, we explored in this study how the molecular composition of sediment OM varies spatially within a single lake, and rela...

Global warming is expected to be most pronounced in the Arctic where permafrost thaw and release of old carbon may provide an important feedback mechanism to the climate system. To better understand and predict climate effects and feedbacks on the cycling of elements within and between ecosystems in northern latitude landscapes, a thorough understa...

Global warming is expected to be most pronounced in the Arctic where permafrost thaw and release of old carbon may provide an important feedback mechanism to the climate system. To better understand and predict climate effects and feedbacks on the cycling of elements within and between ecosystems in northern latitude landscapes, a thorough understa...

In proglacial landscapes, such as western Greenland, eolian transport plays an important role for the influx of particulate material to lakes. On the basis of an analysis of a sediment profile and surface sediments from several lakes, we show that eolian activity has a strong influence on sediment deposition in time and space. Principal component a...

Mining in Falun, Sweden, was first mentioned in a deed from ad 1288, but previous studies of peat and lake sediments inferred that mining began during the fifth to eighth centuries. In order to reassess these findings, we performed new geochemical analyses on new samples from three key sites: Tisksjöbergets myr, a buried mire alongside the mine; Ti...

The origin and degradation/preservation state of organic matter (OM) in lacustrine systems can be studied using its molecular composition. Pyrolysis gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (Py-GC-MS) allows rapid assessment of OM-rich samples and has proven a useful tool for peat, lacustrine and marine deposits, but is rarely applied specifically to l...

X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF) has been used extensively to analyze many types of environmental samples, including lake sediments. In most cases, however, analyses have required either a relatively large sample mass or sample pretreatment, e.g. lithium borate fusion, and have not taken advantage of the potential of XRF analysis as a non-dest...

We used seven annually laminated (varved) sediment cores from Nylandssjön, a lake in northern Sweden, to assess between-core variation and diagenetic changes at annual resolution. By using several cores, multiple elements and employing principal components analysis (PCA), we also studied how the geochemical composition changed over time, and assess...

To assess the rates of compaction in recent, varved (annually laminated) lake sediments, we used a collection of 13 freeze cores sampled from 1979 to 2012 in Nylandssjön (northern Sweden). This unique series of stored freeze cores allowed us to measure how the thickness of individual varves changed when they were overlain by new varves. The compact...

The past decade has seen a rapid increase in interest in the biogeochemical record preserved in peat, particularly as it relates to carbon dynamics and environmental change. Importantly, recent studies show that carbon dynamics, that is, organic matter decomposition, can influence the record of atmospherically derived elements such as halogens and...

The aim of this study was to determine the spatial variability for total- and methylmercury in surface sediments (0–2 cm) across a single whole-lake basin, and to relate this variability to the sediment’s geochemical composition. 83 surface sediment samples from Stor-Strömsjön – a lake with multiple sub-basins located in northern Sweden – were anal...

In lake sediment investigations of heavy metal pollution history, it has become a common approach to calculate enrichment factors (EFs) by normalizing elemental distributions to a reference lithogenic element. However, this approach requires that the reference element remains stable once it has been deposited to the sediment (it is not affected by...

Even if mires have proven to be relatively reliable archives over the temporal trends in atmospheric mercury deposition, there are large discrepancies between sites regarding the magnitude of the anthropogenic contribution to the global mercury cycle. A number of studies have also revealed significant differences in mercury accumulation within the...

Peatlands, which receive much or all of their element inputs (e.g. nutrients or trace metals) via the atmosphere, are considered an ideal archive for studying past changes in mercury (Hg) deposition. These archives potentially contain information not only on important anthropogenic contributions to the environment over the past few centuries, but a...

In sub-arctic and arctic regions mercury is an element of concern for both wildlife and humans. Over thousands of years large amounts of atmospherically deposited mercury, both from natural and anthropogenic sources, have been sequestered together with carbon in northern peatlands. Many of these peatlands are currently underlain by permafrost, whic...

The intention of the European Water Framework Directive (WFD) and the national guidelines that implement the WFD is that present-day conditions and future management strategies are to be based on an understanding of reference conditions for the particular water body of interest. In the context of non-synthetic pollutants such as lead, mercury and c...

Establishment of plans for environmental planning and management requires that a number of natural and societal factors must be taken into consideration. Insights into the inherent dynamics of nature as well as the role that past human activities have played for establishing the current condition of the landscape and the natural environment in gene...

Easily discernible sediment varves (annual laminations) may be formed in temperate zone lakes, and reflect seasonal changes in the composition of the accumulating material derived from the lake and its catchment (minerogenic and organic material). The appearance of varves may also be influenced by chemical processes. We assessed the role of iron (F...

To assess the long-term (27 yr) effects of sediment aging on stable carbon and nitrogen isotope values (delta C-13 and delta N-15), we used a collection of eight freeze cores of annually laminated (varved) lake sediment collected from 1979 to 2007 in Nylandssjon (northern Sweden). Previous research has shown that 20-23% of carbon and 35% of nitroge...

Metal pollution is viewed as a modern problem that began in the 19th century and accelerated through the 20th century; however, in many parts of the globe this view is wrong. Here, we studied past waterborne metal pollution in lake sediments from the Bergslagen region in central Sweden, one of many historically important mining regions in Europe. W...

Thawing of permafrost and a subsequent accelerated loss of mercury from the soil constitute a possible threat to the quality of high-latitude surface waters. In this paper we estimate the export of mercury generated by a thawing palsa mire in northern Sweden, by assessing net mercury storage changes along thermokarst erosion gradients. Lower mercur...

Using lake sediments to infer past total mercury and methylmercury loading to the environment requires that diagenetic processes within the sediment do not significantly affect the concentrations or net accumulation rates of the mercury species. Because carbon is lost during early sediment diagenesis, the close link between carbon and mercury raise...

We used a collection of ten freeze cores of annually laminated (varved) lake sediment from Nylandssjon in northern Sweden collected from 1979 to 2007 to follow the long-term loss of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) due to processes that occur in the lake bottom as sediment ages. We compared specific years in the different cores. For example, the loss of...

Under specific conditions, annually-laminated (varved) sediments are formed in lakes. Such lake sediments are rare, but of great interest to studies of past environmental conditions since they provide annual or even seasonal time resolution, and can be used to follow environmental changes over hundreds or thousands of years. The chemical compositio...

The organic horizon (the mor layer) of podzolized boreal forest soils has accumulated atmospheric fallout of mercury and lead over centuries, resulting in current concentrations close to levels where negative effects on soil biota are thought to occur. To what extent the pollution history is preserved in the stratigraphy of this horizon is not well...