Environmental Studies Based on Lake Sediment Records in China: A Review

Abstract

Lake sediment records are of great importance for understanding the evolution of watershed environments. Various studies have been carried out to determine the depositional ages of lake sediments and to examine their physical, chemical, and biological characteristics. The aim is to construct the historical vegetation, environment, and climate patterns in Chinese lake watersheds. In this review, we obtained relevant studies on lake sediment records by searching the key word ‘age-depth’ from the following databases: Web of Science and the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI, the largest Chinese academic database). We analyzed the literature based on its type (published in a Chinese/English journal or as a Master’s/PhD thesis), period of publication, journal (if published in a journal), key authors, study area, dating scale, and main aims. The results suggest that the lakes in the plateau regions are the most popular research topic, typically covering 100–200 years (short-term) and 500–30,000 years (long-term). The literature focuses on a wide range of topics, from past environmental evolution in watersheds to lake ecology, and it provides a solid foundation for a better understanding of the regional climate change and the preservation of lake environments and ecosystems. In the future, the resulting data obtained from environmental reconstructions with lake sediments will need to be integrated with emerging information processing technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence and meta-analysis) to disentangle the complex interplay between the Earth’s surface processes and global climate change; furthermore, strengthening interdisciplinary collaboration will deepen our comprehension of the man-land relationship and promote the sustainable management of lake ecosystems in the context of global climate change.