Thijs Van der Meeren

Ghent University | UGhent · Department of Biology

Anthropogenic climate change is predicted to severely impact the global hydrological cycle¹, particularly in tropical regions where agriculture-based economies depend on monsoon rainfall². In the Horn of Africa, more frequent drought conditions in recent decades3,4 contrast with climate models projecting precipitation to increase with rising temper...

For decades, diatoms have been recognized as powerful bio-indicators of modern water quality. They have also been utilized in the design of transfer functions, which can be applied to diatom assemblages in lake sediment cores to infer aspects of past lake hydrochemistry and estimate variables that can be incorporated into paleohydrology models. The...

The climate history of the Sahara desert during recent millennia is obscured by the near absence of natural climate archives, hampering insight in the relative importance of southerly (tropical) and northerly (midlatitude) weather systems at submillennial time scales. A new lake sediment record from Ounianga Serir oasis in northern Chad, spanning t...

Citation: Van der Meeren, T., and D. Verschuren. 2021. Zoobenthos community turnover in a 1650-yr lake-sediment record of climate-driven hydrological change. Ecosphere 12(1): Abstract. In fluctuating lake ecosystems, the severity of anthropogenic disturbance is often difficult to assess because the magnitude of natural dynamics rivals or surpasses...

Lake Naivasha (central Rift Valley, Kenya) is regionally unique in having accumulated a continuous sediment record of climate-driven palaeohydrological change over the past 1650 years, attesting to dramatic shifts between freshwater high-stands and either fresh or saline low-stands. This study employs fossil ostracod assemblages and stable-isotope...

Continental rift systems are often characterized by geothermal activity and associated discharge of hot groundwater, which can substantially impact the water, solute and sediment budgets of rift-valley lakes. Hot-spring inflow can result in complex lake hydro- and geochemistry, but also buffers against the desiccation of closed-basin lakes in dry c...

The freshwater crater lakes of western Uganda represent an important natural resource for the region’s rural communities, but their capacity to provide drinking-quality water and other ecosystem services is being threatened by rapidly intensifying human activity within their catchments. This study investigated the relationship between the compositi...

Reconstructions of the timing and frequency of past eruptions are important to assess the propensity for future volcanic activity, yet in volcanic areas such as the East African Rift only piecemeal eruption histories exist. Understanding the volcanic history of scoria‐cone fields, where eruptions are often infrequent and deposits strongly weathered...

This paper presents the results of multi-disciplinary research carried out on the deposits of a residual channel (“Peerdemeers”) of the Kale/Durme River in the Moervaart depression, NW Belgium. The combination of physical, botanical, zoological and chemical analyses allowed a detailed reconstruction of the channel ecosystem and the vegetation in th...

Multi-proxy analysis of sediment cores from five key locations in hypersaline, alkaline Lake Bogoria (central Kenya Rift Valley) has allowed reconstruction of its history of depositional and hydrological change during the past 1300 years. Analyses including organic matter and carbonate content, granulometry, mineralogical composition, charcoal coun...

In this paper, a detailed vegetation and environmental reconstruction for the Lateglacial interstadial in the Moervaart area (NW Belgium) is discussed, in relation to former human occupation patterns. This reconstruction is based on a multi-disciplinary research carried out on calcareous deposits of a large palaeolake (~ 25 km²). The combination of...

This paper presents the results of multi-disciplinary research carried out on the deposits of Moervaart depression, NW Belgium, one of the largest palaeolakes (~25 km2) that existed during the Lateglacial interstadial in NW Europe. The multi-proxy study, including physical (organic matter and calcium carbonate, magnetic susceptibility,micromorpholo...

The current study presents the ostracod communities recovered from 26 shallow waterbodies in southern Kenya, combined with an ecological assessment of habitat characteristics. A total of 37 waterbodies were sampled in 2001 and 2003, ranging from small ephemeral pools to large permanent lakes along broad gradients in altitude (700–2 800 m) and salin...

AimFossil pollen spectra from lake sediments in central and western Mongolia have been used to interpret past climatic variations, but hitherto no suitable modern pollen–climate calibration set has been available to infer past climate changes quantitatively. We established such a modern pollen dataset and used it to develop a transfer function mode...

Ostracodes (Ostracoda, Crustacea) are aquatic micro-crustaceans with a significant representation in the fossil record. If the environmental influence on the species composition of their communities is robustly quantified, past changes in ostracode communities reflected in fossil assemblages can be used for paleo-environmental reconstruction. We an...

The geochemical fingerprint of biogenic calcite is largely governed by the physical environment and water chemistry at the place and time of calcification, which is in turn related to both the ecology and phenology of the target study species. We present data on the valve chemistry (δ18O, δ13C, Mg/Ca, Sr/Ca) of living Limnocythere inopinata, a comm...

Quantification of intra-specific morphological variability of aquatic biota along environmental gradients can produce biological proxies that can be applied to paleoenvironmental reconstructions. This morphology-derived proxy information can be especially valuable when dealing with low-diversity fossil assemblages, i.e. in situations when paleoenvi...

Aquatic biota in Central Asia witnesses and faces a changing environment. Because ostracodes contribute to both extant and fossil lacustrine diversity, they can be used to track evolution in water quality. Living ostracode communities in a variety of aquatic habitats of western Mongolia were analyzed in relation to environmental and hydrochemical v...

The ostracod species Tonnacypris estonica (Järvekülg, 1960), T. tonnensis (Diebel & Pietrzeniuk, 1975), T. edhmdi n. sp. and T. mnazepovae n. sp. are here reported from Mongolia. Redescriptions of females of T. glacialis (Sars, 1890) and males of T. lutaria (Koch, 1838) are included. The revised generic diagnosis maintains the main character of the...