Because of its prominent role in global biomass storage, land vegetation is the most obvious biota to be investigated for records of dramatic ecologic crisis in Earth history. There is accumulating evidence that, throughout the world, sedimentary organic matter preserved in latest Permian deposits is characterized by unparalleled abundances of fungal remains, irrespective of depositional enviro...

A macro has been developed that allows for automated statistical analyses of particles. It can be used with binary images from any source, and is developed for use with lacustrine, marine, Aeolian, and marine sediments. The macro code is freely available, and runs on open-source software. It has been specially designed to accommodate very small regions of interest relative to particle size, and...

We report herein the first description of the physical structure of the aquatic habitats of the Lower Paraguay River along 390 km from Asunción city (Paraguay) to the confluence with the Paraná River. The hierarchical ordination of the Fluvial Hydrosystem Approach (FHA) allowed us to classify the Lower Paraguay as a meandering functional sector where five functional sets were identified: (a) ma...

Many lacustrine chronology records suffer from radiocarbon reservoir effects. A continuous, accurate varve chronology, in conjunction with accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) 14C dating, was used to determine the age of lacustrine sediment and to quantify the past 14C reservoir effect in Sugan Lake (China). Reservoir age varied from 4340 to 2590 yr due to 14C-depleted water in the late Holocene...

Sub-recent sediments in modern lakes are ideal to study early diagenetic processes with a combination of physical, chemical, and biological approaches. Current developments in the rapidly evolving field of geomicrobiology have allowed determining the role of microbes in these processes (Nealson and Stahl, 1997; Frankel and Bazylinski, 2003). Their distribution and diversity in marine sediments ...

Following deglaciation, the long-term pattern of change in diatom communities and the inferred history of the aquatic environment are affected by a hierarchy of environmental controls. These include direct climate impacts on a lake’s thermal and hydrologic budgets, aswell as the indirect affects of climate on catchment processes, such as weathering, soil development, microbial activity, fire, a...

The Arabian Peninsula is a key region for understanding climate change and human occupation history in a marginal environment. The Mundafan palaeolake is situated in southern Saudi Arabia, in the Rub' al-Khali (the 'Empty Quarter'), the world's largest sand desert. Here we report the first discoveries of Middle Palaeolithic and Neolithic archaeological sites in association with the palaeolake. ...

A thorough knowledge of sedimentary processes that cause the production, transportation and deposition in varied hydrodynamic conditions, is most important in environmental reconstruction. Size analysis of sediment is an essential requirement to understand their mechanism of transportion and deposition. Textural parameters are primarily related to made of transportation and energy condition of ...

The Sava depression represents the most southern part of the Pannonian basin (Fig. 1). After the Middle Eocene, a long continental phase started in the area represented by the present depression, during which tectonic movements occurred and a fault network was created along which the basin subsided by extension. The oldest proven sediments belong to the fresh-water Ottnangian deposits which are...

In order to study the olfactory discriminating ability of lacustrine sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) and masu salmon (O. masou), the integrated olfactory nerve response to various freshwaters was recorded by electrophysiological techniques. In both species independent of sex and gonadal maturity, each freshwater caused a different olfactory response. Source and effluent waters of the cultur...