The Circum-Caspian region is a place rich in vegetation mixing steppes, meadows, forests, forest-steppes, and riparian forests. These ecosystems are controlled by today's bioclimatical, ecological and anthropological forcings and are also the heritage of the past. Semi-arid regions are more sensitive than arid or humid regions to small or large variations in the intensity, distribution and quantity of humidity.

As part of the ANR Stepability research project, which examines the resilience of steppe ecosystems in the Circum-Caspian region, lake and wetland ecosystems provide sedimentary archives of past changes. It is a key region for understanding the dynamics at work between Europe and Eastern Asia, but this region remains understudied.

In this session, we aim to present several case studies from this region such as Aral Sea in Uzbekistan, Lake Zaligol in Azerbaijan and Lake Sevan in Armenia. The sediments of these lakes recorded the factors that influenced lake and surrounding ecosystems during the Holocene and Anthropocene. To this end, a multi-proxy approach is used for each site to disentangle palaeoecological, geological, and human-related factors, and to propose independent climate reconstructions from pollen and BrGDGT.