ORIGINAL PAPER Limnogeology in Brazil’s ‘‘forgotten wilderness’’: a synthesis from the large floodplain lakes of the Pantanal

Abstract Sediment records from floodplain lakes have a large and commonly untapped potential for inferring wetland response to global change. The Brazilian Pantanal is a vast, seasonally inundated savanna floodplain system controlled by the flood pulse of the Upper Paraguay River. Little is known, however, about how floodplain lakes within the Pantanal act as sedimentary basins, or what influence hydroclimatic variables exert on limnogeological processes. This knowledge gap was addressed through an actualistic analysis of three large, shallow (\5 m) floodplain lakes in the western Pantanal: Lagoa Gaı́va, Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10933-011-9538-5) contain