Sediment Organic Matter

The organic matter content of lake sediments provides a variety of indicators, or proxies, that can be used to reconstruct paleoenvironments of lakes and their watersheds and to infer histories of regional climate changes. Organic matter constitutes a minor but important fraction of lake sediments. It originates from the complex mixture of lipids, carbohydrates, proteins, and other organic matter components produced by organisms that have lived in and around the lake (e.g., Meyers, 1997; Rullkotter, 2000). As an accumulation of “geochemical fossils”, the organic matter content of lake sediments provides information that is important to interpretations of both natural and human-induced changes in local and…