Inaugural lectures
Wednesday March 3, 2010 at 5.00pm - Lecture theatre SMB.0.14, Stewart Mason Building
Lakes and global environmental change
Professor John Anderson, Geography
Lakes are considered sites of great scenic beauty and used extensively for recreation. In many parts of the world they are also a vital natural resource both in terms of water supply and food production.
Lakes can be hotspots of aquatic biodiversity and are highly sensitive ecosystems: as a result, they are important for recognising the increasingly heavy footprint of anthropogenic impact on global biogeochemical cycles.
Although they only cover a fraction of the earth, their role in biogeochemical cycling is disproportionate to their surface area. For example, lakes are now considered to an important component of the carbon cycle, both in terms of processing and burying terrestrially-derived carbon.
In this lecture, Professor Anderson illustrates the role of lakes as sentinels of change with examples from his work in the UK, Scandinavia, China and Greenland.