Ecosystem Services: Lessons From the Past for a Sustainable Future - Biodiversity Conservation and Environmental Change - page 118

1.0

0.9

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0.7

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0.3

Biodiversity
Air quality
Sediment quality
Regulating service Index
Soil stability

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1930 1935 1940 1945 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010

Year

Figure 6.2 Ecosystem services in the Lower Yangtze Basin 1930-2006, showing normalized biodiver-
sity, air quality, sediment quality, regulating service index, and soil stability. Vertical bars show major
twentieth-twenty-first century political events (from left to right): People's Republic of China founded,
1949; Great Leap Forward 1958-1961; Cultural Revolution 1966-1976; Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms
from late 1970s to early 1980s; leadership of Jiang Zemin from 1989; leadership of Hu Jintao from 2003.
Adapted from Dearing et al. (2012).

Water management

Some of the best examples of the use of palaeoecology in effective ecosystem service man-
agement come from the field of water management and restoration. Lake sediments are the
primary source of palaeoenvironmental archives, and can provide records of changing water
quality, climatic proxies, and the effect of changing land use on erosion and nutrient cycling
(Gell 2010, Battarbee and Bennion 2011, Bennion et al. 2011, Battarbee et al. 2012, Dearing et al.
2012). Measure of erosion, salinity, acidity, heavy metal pollution, and eutrophication can all
be tracked over long time periods, allowing the natural range of variability and the effects of
industrialization and intensive land use to be understood (Gell 2010, Bennion et al. 2011). For
example, oxygen depletion and the concentration of dissolved phosphorus and other nutri-
ents can be inferred from microfossil assemblages such as midge larvae (chironomids), while
acidification and changes in salinity could be tracked over time using pH-sensitive diatoms.
Nutrient cycling and erosion can be tracked using geochemistry and magnetic minerals. In
terms of water management, these metrics provide information crucial to planning realistic