To assess the long-term impact of climate change and human influence on lakes and their sedimentary carbon storage, paleo-environmental approaches using well-dated lake sediment cores can be employed. Here, we reconstruct carbon mass accumulation rates for organic and inorganic carbon since 13 ka BP in Rotsee, a perialpine lake near the Swiss Alps, using a 12-m sediment core. A multiproxy approach (XRF, carbon and nitrogen iso...

Tropical freshwater lakes are well known for their high biodiversity, and particularly the East African Great Lakes are renowned for their adaptive radiation of cichlid fishes. While comparative phylogenetic analyses of extant species flocks have revealed patterns and processes of their diversification, little is known about evolutionary trajectories within lineages, the impacts of environmental drivers, or the scope and natur...

Even though sediment macrofauna are widespread in the global seafloor, the influence of these fauna on microbial communities that drive sediment biogeochemical cycles remains poorly understood. According to recent field investigations, macrofaunal activities control bacterial and archaeal community structure in surface sediments, but the inferred mechanisms have not been experimentally verified. Here we use laboratory microcos...

Human impacts such as habitat loss, climate change and biological invasions are radically altering biodiversity, with greater effects projected into the future. Evidence suggests human impacts may differ substantially between terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems, but the reasons for these differences are poorly understood. We propose an integrative approach to explain these differences by linking impacts to four fundamental p...

Summary Lake sediments are globally important carbon sinks. Although the fate of organic carbon in lake sediments depends significantly on microorganisms, only few studies have investigated controls on lake sedimentary microbial communities. Here we investigate the impact of anthropogenic eutrophication, which affects redox chemistry and organic matter (OM) sources in sediments, on microbial communities across five lakes in ce...

Summary Marine sediments harbour extracellular DNA (exDNA) not associated with currently living organisms. Including this exDNA in genetic surveys may distort abundance and diversity estimates of living prokaryotic communities. We separately extract exDNA and intracellular DNA (inDNA) from 11 horizons in a 10‐m deep sediment core from Aarhus Bay (Denmark) that spans > 9000 years of Holocene sedimentation. We compare depth prof...

Summary Although subseafloor sediments are known to harbour a vast number of microbial cells, the distribution, diversity, and origins of fungal populations remain largely unexplored. In this study, we cultivated fungi from 34 of 47 deep coal‐associated sediment samples collected at depths ranging from 1289 to 2457 m below the seafloor (mbsf) off the Shimokita Peninsula, Japan (1118 m water depth). We obtained a total of 69 fu...