Dinoflagellate cyst assemblages as indicators for environmental conditions in Korean coastal areas

Abstract

Understanding trends in historical and ongoing environmental changes in coastal areas is one of the requirements for safe and sustainable management of coastal areas. To reconstruct past environmental conditions, the utilization of microfossils such as pollen, diatom, foraminifera and dinoflagellate cyst has become a popular methodology. In particular, the use of dinoflagellate cysts as indicators of historical environmental conditions has increased significantly for the last 30 years. However, in Korean coastal areas previous studies concerning dinoflagellate cysts have concentrated on only understanding their distributional characteristics, and there is no information available yet on the relationship between dinoflagellate cyst assemblages and environmental conditions. For that reason, here we introduce the dinoflagellate assemblages as indicators for environmental conditions, based on published data.