An integrative paleolimnological approach for studying evolutionary processes

The field of paleolimnology has made tremendous progress in reconstructing past biotic and abiotic environmental conditions of aquatic ecosystems based on sediment records. This, together with the rapid development of molecular technologies, provides new opportunities for studying evolutionary processes affecting lacustrine communities over multicentennial to millennial timescales. From an evolutionary perspective, such analyses provide important insights into the chronology of past environmental conditions, the dynamics of phenotypic evolution, and species diversification. Here, we review recent advances in paleolimnological, paleogenetic, and molecular approaches and highlight how their integrative use can help us better understand the ecological and evolutionary responses of species and communities to environmental change. Paleolimnological data can help to reconstruct past environmental conditions and their changes over time in aquatic ecosystems, providing important information for inferring past ecological conditions, trends in community assembly through time, and rates and directions of evolution.New approaches to analyzing ancient sedimentary DNA, RNA, or proteins, lipid biomarkers, and stable isotopes can be combined with phenotypic analyses of (sub)fossils to test novel hypotheses about past community assembly, and evolutionary processes such as phenotypic change and adaptation, as well as phenotypic diversification and adaptive radiation.Integration of these new and classical approaches is expanding our ability to understand organism–environment interactions and evolutionary responses to environmental change.