Abstract
The recent history of Little Round Lake, a small meromictic lake in southeastern Ontario, is considered. Pollen analyses were used to identify past changes in terrestrial vegetation, whilst limnological conditions were interpreted on the basis of diatom and chrysophyte microfossils. Contemporaneous with the arrival of European settlers (ca. A. D. 1850), the predisturbance assemblage of oligotrophic Cyclotella diatoms was replaced by Synedra spp., which then succeeded to a eutrophic flora dominated by Stephanodiscus hantzschii. Meanwhile, synuracean algae were almost completely excluded. Over the last 30 years, the algal microfossils indicate that the lake underwent a marked return to oligotrophy. Evidence is presented which suggests that this shift was related to the cultural enhancement of meromixis by the seepage of road salt.
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Smoll, J.P., Brown, S.R. & McNeely, R.N. Cultural disturbances and trophic history of a small meromictic lake from central Canada. Hydrobiologia 103, 125–130 (1983). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00028439
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00028439