evaluating the use of lake sedimentary DNA in palaeolimnology: a comparison with long-term microscopy-based monitoring of the phytoplankton community

Palaeolimnological records provide valuable information about how phytoplankton respond to long-term drivers of environmental change. Traditional palaeolimnological tools such as microfossils and pigments are restricted to taxa that leave sub-fossil remains, and a method that can be applied to the wider community is required. Sedimentary DNA (sedDNA), extracted from lake sediment cores, shows promise in palaeolimnology, but validation against data from long-term monitoring of lake water is necessary to enable its development as a reliable record of past phytoplankton communities. To address this need, 18S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing was carried out on lake sediments from a core collected from Esthwaite Water (English Lake District) spanning ~105 years. This sedDNA record was compared with concurrent long-term microscopy-based monitoring of phytoplankton in the surface water. Broadly comparable trends were observed between the datasets, with respect to the diversity and relative abunda..., This dataset contains the long-term microscopy-based monitoring record of phytoplankton genus occurrence in Esthwaite Water. This record has been compared with a sedimentary DNA (sedDNA) record of the phytoplankton community to evaluate the performance of sedDNA in palaeolimnology.
Phytoplankton in surface water samples collected from Esthwaite Water on a weekly/fortnightly basis from 1945-2010 were identified and enumerated with microscopy. Counts were grouped at the genus level, converted to presence-absence, summed by year and normalised by the number of sampling occasions per year., , # Evaluating the use of lake sedimentary DNA in palaeolimnology: A comparison with long-term microscopy-based monitoring of the phytoplankton community

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.q83bk3jpw](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.q83bk3jpw)

This dataset includes the occurrence of phytoplankton genera identified with microscopy in Esthwaite Water from 1945 to 2010.

Phytoplankton in surface water samples collected from Esthwaite Water on a weekly/fortnightly basis from 1945-2010 were identified and enumerated with microscopy. Counts were grouped at the genus level, converted to presence-absence, summed by year and normalised by the number of sampling occasions per year.

## Description of the data and file structure

1. Annual genus occurrence
* This file is a matrix containing the frequency of occurrence of each phytoplankton genus identified from 1945 to 2010
* Rows are genera
* Columns are years
2. Sampling frequency
* This file contains the number of sampling occassions p...