Adding time to the conservation toolkit: palaeoecology and long term wetland function dynamics

Excerpt

One of the many fascinating aspects of wetlands is their ability to preserve an archive of their own history in the accumulating body of sediments building up beneath the surface, particularly but not exclusively in peatlands. The sedimentary record can be thought of as an archive of monitoring data collected over centuries and millennia, waiting to be read. This special issue brings together a selection of papers presented at the 7th INTECOL Wetlands Meeting in Utrecht, The Netherlands, July 25th–30th 2004 (see also Verhoeven et al. 2006; Bobbink et al. 2006). These papers give a flavour of the wide range of methodologies used, and the situations investigated by palaeoecologists, and demonstrate how a palaeoecological perspective can add to our understanding of contemporary issues of concern such as fluctuations in biodiversity and the response of wetland systems to fluctuations in hydrology, water quality, and overall climatic change. …