Spanish lakes

Aims

As part of the PhD thesis of Pedro Rivas.

Fires and climate are active components of the Earth System, which strongly interact with each other. Projected climate change, induced by human activities, will significantly affect both fire regimes and hydroclimate, one of the key drivers of fires in the climate system. Human-climate synergies in the Holocene are exceptionally important for the understanding of future fire and hydroclimate regimes under a global climate warming scenario. To study past fire-climate interactions, proxies of climate, vegetation and fire incidence are needed. In this sense, the first main objective of this dissertation is to validate a new set of environmental proxies in Spain based on pyrogenic and higher plant biomarkers. The aim is to compare their spatial variability (characterized through the use of molecular organic geochemical techniques) with the corresponding environmental variability on fire occurrence and hydroclimatic parameters. This has been undertaken using an exhaustive data set of recent surface lake sediments and soils from natural and rural areas

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