Abstract
Watershed land-use changes, including urbanization, have caused accelerated soil erosion, which in turn has increased sediment accumulation rates in most aging reservoirs in the mid-western United States (USA), thereby posing a threat to their longevity and productivity. We analyzed three sediment cores from each of two reservoirs in the mid-western USA, the Webber Dam impoundment in Michigan and Goshen Pond in Indiana. Core chronologies were established using 137Cs and 210Pb. Concentrations of organic carbon and nitrogen and their stable isotope compositions (δ13C and δ15N) were measured to investigate past land-use changes. We used three excess 210Pb-based (210Pbxs) sedimentation rate models (constant 210Pb flux and sedimentation, constant rate of supply of 210Pb and constant initial 210Pb concentration) to develop core chronologies and compared them to the chronology obtained from the 137Cs peak. Validation of the excess 210Pb-based chronology with137Cs-based chronology requires more than one 210Pbxs-based-model. That is, even in one watershed, output from more than one 210Pbxs-based model may have to be compared with an independent time marker. We compared C/N ratios, δ13C and δ15N among three time horizons in each of the three cores from the reservoirs (corresponding to dates of 1950, 1970 and 2010). Within a reservoir, there can be large differences between cores for a given time horizon, indicating there could be spatial differences in sources of C and N and the processes that influence carbon and nitrogen isotopes. We conclude that multiple sediment cores from reservoirs should be analyzed if carbon and nitrogen isotopes in sediments are to be used for paleoenvironmental inference.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Robin Heichel for help with sample preparation for stable isotope analysis. We thank John Barkach for assisting us with the sediment core collection. This project was funded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (W911XK-10-C-0011 and W911XK-14-C-0023). We thank the two anonymous reviewers for their in-depth review of our manuscript. We thank Editor Mark Brenner for a thorough editing of the manuscript.
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Kumar, A., Hage-Hassan, J., Baskaran, M. et al. Multiple sediment cores from reservoirs are needed to reconstruct recent watershed changes from stable isotopes (δ13C and δ15N) and C/N ratios: case studies from the mid-western United States. J Paleolimnol 56, 15–31 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10933-016-9888-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10933-016-9888-0