The development of a diatom database for inferring lake salinity, western Victoria, Australia: Towards a quantitative approach for reconstructing past climates

The development of a modern data set of 156 diatom samples from salt lakes has provided evidence of the tolerance of a large number of taxa to the salinity of lake waters. Thirty taxa have been recorded from 30 or more samples and so have been well characterised. A further 42 taxa have been recorded from 10 or more samples. The lakes sampled range in salinity from the freshwater-oligosaline boundary to well into the hypersaline range, so the upper and lower salinity tolerance limits of many species were investigated. Canonical correspondence analysis of the data set showed that salinity was the most important of the tested parameters influencing the diatom assemblages in the samples. Randomisation tests have provided correlation values between measured and predicted salinity comparable with those gained from other major salt lake diatom data sets, suggesting that this set is a good predictor of lake salinity.