Biomarkers

Duration:

01.11.2020 –

Problem statement

A major current scientific, and societal, challenge is to assess potential ecosystem response to ongoing global warming. Analogies to past climate and episodes of environmental change might serve as guidelines to do so. Organic molecules, originally produced on land or in the watercolumn and then archived in the sedimentary record, can serve as informants of past organisms, processes and environmental conditions. We will employ such molecular biomarkers and molecular proxies to investigate how biodiversity and the function and composition of ecosystems responded to past episodes of environmental and climate change. Theme 3 (Paleoecosystems and Paleobiodiversity) in the Research Unit Recorder offers the remarkable opportunity to combine our findings with the microfossil record and ancient DNA analysis, and provide a truly integrative understanding of the interplay of biotic and abiotic factors.

The use of Mass Spectrometry Imaging (MSI) of molecular biomarkers and proxies will be of especial relevance to this project, as it provides previously inaccessible temporal resolution. While our view is typically trained to concentrate on changes in the mean state of climate, the effects most impactful from the human and ecosystem perspective are often single events (e.g. floods and droughts) or changes in intra- (seasonality) or interannual variability. Therefore, a main target will be to characterize such environmental perturbations and the associated response of the ecosystem. MSI will add a fine scale temporal component that reveals the exact sequence and rate of change, and guide other techniques to sections of the sedimentary record where most acute perturbations are recorded.