This proposal is to maintain and develop Belgium’s role as an integral part of two international research programmes, "Palaeolimnological investigations of coastal continental lakes in the Larsemann Hills" and "Millennial-scale History of the George VI Sound Ice Shelf and palaeoenvironmental history of Alexander Island, Antarctic Peninsula". Both are core projects in the British Antarctic Survey (U.K.) 2000-2006 5 year science programme "Signals in Antarctica of Past Global Changes (SAGES)* which combines lake, ice and marine sediment cores in an integrated study of past environments. SAGES is designed to contribute to work tasks set by the past global changes (PAGES) component of the International Geosphere Biosphere Program (IGBP) and the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research (SCAR) Global Change and Antarctica Program (GLOCHANT).

The continued collaboration of the Belgian scientific teams headed by Dr. Wim Vyverman and Dr. Annick Wilmotte has been requested by the coordinators of this programme, Dr. Dominic Hodgson and Dr. Eric Wolff, following a successful partnership developed within the framework of the EU-project MICROMAT. During MICROMAT the Belgian teams have developed novel expertise in the study of microbial communities in lake sediments, which constitutes a unique potential to develop molecular tools for palaeoenvironmental reconstructions. The current proposal seeks to obtain from the Belgian government the financial means to support the Belgian personnel, their laboratories and the working costs necessary to contribute to maintain this international scientific cooperation.

The general objective of the current proposal is to contribute to the understanding of the millennial- and centennial-scale Late Quaternary climate history of contrasting Antarctic environments, based on a multi-proxy, multi-site approach of coastal lakes sediments.

The specific objectives of the current proposal are:

1) The further development and testing of molecular tools (based on rDNA) for palaeoenvironmental reconstruction.
2) The development of calibration datasets of fossilizable protists and biomolecules representing current environmental variability in contrasting maritime and continental Antarctic coastal regions.
3) The construction and validation of inference models and indices to infer environmental conditions based on fossil assemblages of a range of micro-organisms and biomolecules
4) The application of these multiple proxies in the analysis of sediment cores from coastal lakes in continental and maritime Antarctica
The participation in the integrated analysis of multiple biological, physical and chemical proxies and in the formulation of regional reconstructions of climate change in Antarctica during the past 30.000 years.