Tiny Crustaceans, Big Story: Subfossil Cladocera and Multi-Proxy Sedimentary Records Reveal over 150 Years of Coupled Effects of Damming, Eutrophication and Aquaculture on a Yangtze Floodplain Lake in China.

Floodplain lake ecosystems around the world have witnessed growing environmental degradation under combined natural climatic variability and anthropogenic activities. Reconstructing their long-term ecological change is vital for lake ecosystem conservation and management. Cladoceran subfossils are used as an important proxy indicator to reconstruct ecological evolution of floodplain lake systems worldwide. The sedimentary record of Zhangdu Lake, a shallow floodplain lake in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River in China, is important for reconstructing more than 150 years of environmental history and tracing the lake ecosystem's transition from a natural flood-pulse system to a new regime driven by anthropogenic disturbances. Integration of subfossil cladoceran data with other biological proxies (diatoms and testate amoebae) and physicochemical sedimentary proxies successfully identified the period of river-lake disconnection and the associated ecological processes and succession in Lake Zhangdu. An abrupt disconnection of the lake from the Yangtze River in the early 1950s led to a sudden ecological vulnerability together with a drastic community decline. Sequential