Question: Do you use the DNA structure in plants to help you figure out what humans are doing to destroy the lakes and the habitat around it?

Laura Hunt answered on 9 Jul 2020:

Hi Naomi, we haven’t yet used plant DNA to see how vegetation around the lakes has responded to human impacts. Instead, we have been looking at pollen that has collected at the bottom of the lake and preserved in the mud, which we use to reconstruct what vegetation was like in the past. We can also measure the chemical composition of the mud, and the weight of atoms (the smallest building blocks that make up stuff) in different components of the mud, as this is affected by vegetation too!