oa A 14,000-Year Record of Environmental Changes in the Northern Adriatic: Insights from Sedimentary Hydrocarbons in Lake Vrana

There is extensive evidence in the literature that oligotrophic lakes are highly sensitive to environmental changes, including human impacts and climate change. This study was conducted on a 4.4-meter sediment core from the highly oligotrophic freshwater karst Lake Vrana (Island of Cres, Croatia). The lake’s unique hydrogeological and geographical settings have recently been recognized as having significant potential, not only for interpreting human impacts over the past several thousand years, but also for reconstructing paleoclimate changes in the northern Mediterranean, spanning from the late Pleistocene to the entire Holocene ( Schmidt et al., 2000 ; Ilijanic et al., 2024). To complement previous investigations, we applied, for the first time, an organic geochemistry approach with a particular focus on the detailed characterization of major hydrocarbon biomarkers in the sediment.