Editorial: Using Paleolimnology for Lake Restoration and Management

Paleolimnology has been used for decades to reconstruct past environments and more recently, to quantify the observed changes. Various organisms preserve in sediment of lakes and wetlands and can be used to reconstruct how a water body and the surrounding landscape looked like and has changed through time. For example, pollen, charcoal, and macrofossils can be used to reconstruct vegetation and frequency of fires at the local and regional scale, diatoms, and Cladocera can be used to reconstruct changes in PH and nutrients and insects are indicators of lake level, oxygen concentration, nutrients, and temperature. Thousands of paleostudies have been made worldwide and have exemplified the power of paleolimnology in reconstructing the past at long (more than 100,000 years) and shorter (a few decades; emporal scale). The areas where paleolimnoogy can have the most impact on human-time scales, i.e., lake restoration and management, still resist its implementation into present and future decision making, in most regions of the world. In the UK (Battarbee et al., 2005), Canada (Rühland et al., 2003), and the USA (Brenner et al., 1993), paleolimnology has been used successfully in case studies to provide the background conditions for restoration and/or to evaluate the state of lakes after restoration. However, these studies are still far from being the norm they should be. Too many restoration and management programs and management programs only refer to scarce historical data as baseline. Consequently, restoration technics applied with poorly defined scientific goals can lead to after-restoration states different from the natural state of the water body and/or failed restoration (Sondergaard et al., 2007). In this special issue of Frontiers, researchers show how paleolimnology can be used for decision makers in restoration, and management. Saulnier-Talbot sets the scenario with her opinion on how paleodata can be better used for future management. Other papers tackle on different aspects of the use of paleolimnology for lake restoration and management. These topics are enumerated below.