UCL Professors Julia Day and David Murell in GEE, and Carl Sayer in Geography, together with collaborators from the NHM and QMUL have been awarded a NERC Pushing the Frontiers grant of £950,000 to investigate how freshwater ecosystems respond to environmental stress over centuries.
By “time-travelling” through lake sediments from UK lakes, the team will use sedimentary ancient DNA and palaeogenomic techniques to reconstruct 200–300 years of biodiversity and genomic change. The research will test whether ecosystems shift gradually or reach sudden tipping points, and examine how genetic diversity in a keystone fish species changes following population crashes and recoveries. The findings will provide new insights into how ecosystems and species adapt—or fail to adapt—to long-term human impacts.
