Isotopes and lakes

Isotope geochemistry is increasingly an essential part of environmental and climate change research and now routinely contributes to our understanding of many critical environmental problems, which span the whole of Earth system science and not least in palaeolimnology and limnogeology. The International Association of Limnogeology (http://www.ohio.edu/geology/ial/index.html) organizes an international conference every four years. The fifth International Limnogeology Congress, ILIC V, was held in Konstanz, Germany, from August 31st – September 3rd, 2011. During this congress we identified several papers where isotope methodologies were used in a particularly novel way, or provided an ‘added value’ data set. Many of these are brought together here in a series of state-of-the-art papers dealing with various aspects of isotopes in lake sediment archives.