The recipient of the ESCONI Student Research Grant for 2019 (administered by the Paleontological Society) is Lane Allen, an MS student at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, TX. The title of his research is "Paleolimnological Assessment of Harmful Algal Bloom Trends in Texas Lakes". Congratulations!
Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) are responsible for economic losses in tourism and fishing industries. The environmental factors that drive bloom formation and toxin production are not well understood. By identifying the environmental stressors that prompt HABs, lake management strategies can be improved to reduce HABs and unhealthy lake occurrences. This project will investigate the dynamics of HABs in Texas reservoirs over the past ~100 years in order to identify potential trends of increasing bloom events like those occurring in northern lakes, correlating those trends with potentially important environmental stressors. Diatom subfossils will be collected from sediment cores collected from three Texas reservoirs, and their relative species abundance will be used to infer environmental conditions over the last 60-80 years. Sedimentary DNA from those cores will indicate the occurrence of bloom events, and further HPLC analysis determine if blooms were toxin producing. The occurrence of events such as floods and drought will be detected using X-ray diffraction, which assesses mineral composition and grain size. The cores will be dated using Cs-137, charcoal deposits, and sedimentation rate data maintained for the reservoirs. This project serves to develop the potential to apply paleolimnological techniques to reservoirs, which are largely understudied due to their short lifespan and challenges associated with their hydrology and deposition. Nonetheless, reservoirs are commonly used sources of freshwater and often the only source of paleolimnological records in arid regions, and contain a wealth of untapped data.
