Dr. Laura Caitlin Streib
Postdoctoral researcher
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Dr. Laura Streib is a Zuckerman Postdoctoral Scholar in the joint Israeli-North American postdoctoral track, conducting research both at the University of Haifa and the University of Kentucky. Her research uses lake sediments to study past climate and environments. Her work as part of the Zuckerman program centers on Lake Tanganyika in eastern Africa. She is studying the history of the lake over the past 2000 years, hoping to understand whether past perturbations were caused by natural climatic and environmental variability or by human activity. For her PhD in Earth Sciences at Syracuse University, Dr. Streib studied a 1.4-million-year-old drill core from Lake Malawi, also in eastern Africa. She generated a chronology for this core using luminescence dating and applied diatom paleoecology and geochemical data to study climatic change. She has also worked in western Africa, improving the chronology for and studying the climatic implications of a 1.1-million-year-old drill core from Lake Bosumtwi.
+972-4-6647900
lcstreib@syr.edu
Multipurpose bldg. #130
Current Research
Current Research
Are historic changes to Lake Tanganyika’s fishery caused by climate or anthropogenic activity?
Eastern Africa is a vulnerable region, susceptible to environmental, political, and economic challenges. On the shores of Lake Tanganyika communities have a lifeline. The lake is a vital source of fish protein, fresh water, and income for 12 million people in its catchment. Unfortunately, over the past several decades the lake has been in decline, seeing reductions in biodiversity and fish yields. The reasons for this decline are complex and sometimes debated, encompassing changing fishing practices, climatic variability, and onshore land use change. Providing a stable future for the communities that rely on Lake Tanganyika requires a comprehensive examination of the factors that impact the lake, and thus the fishery. One way to gain this understanding is to look into the past using sedimentary records, to see how the lake responded to variability. We propose to close this gap in understanding by applying sterols, stanols, and elemental geochemistry to sediment cores, aged two thousand years, from Lake Tanganyika. These methods will allow us to study high resolution changes to lake state and the presence of humans in the catchment. Using these datasets, we seek to determine what mechanisms drove changes to the lake and the fishery.
Sunset over Lake Tanganyika
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