Modern communities are used by environmental scientists for monitoring water quality especially in relation to the problems of acidification and eutrophication. Diatoms also preserve well in many lake and marine sediments and thus can be used reconstruct past conditions on a range of timescales from decades to tens of thousands of years. It provides a thorough grounding in diatom analysis and its applications, and assumes no prior knowledge of diatoms. The course consists of lectures and practical classes covering diatom morphology and systematics, evolution, habitats and ecology, taphonomy and preservation, training-sets and transfer functions, and marine biostratigraphy, archaeology, estuarine sediments, climate change, saline lake sediments, eutrophication, lowland lake sediments, acidification, upland lake sediments. Practical classes focus on slide preparation techniques, counting, taxonomy, computing, and the analysis of material from estuarine, marine, eutrophic and acid lake sediments.
Participants are welcome to bring along their own material too e.g. sediment samples, slides etc.
A guide to the morphology of the diatom frustule, with a key to the British Freshwater genera. Handbook of Holocene Palaeoecology and Palaeohydrology. Recent palaeolimnology and diatom-based environmental reconstruction. Quaternary Landscapes University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp. Biology and morphology of the genera.