Time-scales of wildlife – Studies at a biodiversity hotspot – with Árni Einarsson
In a rapidly changing world, the monitoring of wildlife has become an important task. Studying only the present fauna and flora is not enough; we need to know how wildlife is changing and why. Lakes are useful ecosystems in this respect. They are well defined and have a sediment record of microfossils reaching thousands of years back in time. Lake Myvatn in Iceland is a natural laboratory where the variability in space and time has been studied, using a combination of historical and sedimentary data, wildlife monitoring and food-web studies. The talk will be about the rich ecosystem of Myvatn and how processes and their time scales interact. Árni Einarsson has a Ph.D. in ecology and has been studying various aspects of the ecology of Lake Myvatn for half a century, including waterbirds, fish, invertebrates and algae and also sedimentary records of the biota. He is a guest professor at the University of Iceland and a former director of the Myvatn Research Station.
Photo credit: Árni Einarsson