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Abstract
In total, 39 diatom species belonging to 22 genera were identified and photographed from Holocene marine sediment cores of Eastern Newfoundland bays. The cores were retrieved from Placentia Bay in the southeast and Bonavista Bay in the northeast of Newfoundland. The study area lies at the meeting point of the cold Labrador Current and the warmer Gulf Stream and is sensitive to changes in ocean circulation. It is thus an ideal location for paleoceanographic reconstructions based on the analysis of (sub)fossil diatoms, for which a good taxonomic framework is essential. The studied sediment cores encompass different age ranges and together represent the entire Holocene epoch. The most abundant species belonged to the genera Thalassiosira, represented by 10 different species, Fragilariopsis (four species), Detonula, Thalassionema and Odontella (one species each). This study provides an annotated list of the most commonly identified diatom species and references to further literature. All taxa are documented by high quality photomicrographs.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks for help with identification and discussion of some diatom species go to Andrzej Witkowski, Diana Krawczyk, Beth Caissie, Jian Ren and Dongling Li. We also thank Kirsten Rosendal, Aarhus University, for help in the laboratory with the preparation of diatom samples. Thanks to the captain and crew of RV ‘Akademik Ioffe’ as well as the scientific party for their help on the 2007 research cruise during which all the material for this study was collected. The cruise was funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research, Natural Science (project no. 272–06–0604/FNU) and carried out within the Danish-Russian collaboration project ‘Joint paleoceanographic investigations in the Labrador Sea region’. The research has also received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreements no 243908, ‘Past4Future, Climate change-Learning from the past climate’ and 236678, ‘Marie Curie IEF-project CLIMICE’, and from the Danish Council for Independent Research, Natural Sciences (FNU) project OCEANHEAT (grant no. 12–126709).