SCOPSCO: Drilling for Biodiversity in Europe's oldest lake

2009-2013: Within the framework of the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) an international team of scientists aims at conducting a scientific drilling campaign in the oldest European lake, the Balkan Lake Ohrid. The SCOPSCO-Program (Scientific Collaboration on Past Speciation Conditions in Lake Ohrid) is coordinated from the geological side by Bernd Wagner (University of Cologne) and from the biological side by Thomas Wilke (University of Giessen).

Lake Ohrid is the most outstanding European ancient lake with the highest degree of endemic biodiversity of any worldwide ancient lake when taking lake size into account. Whereas the geology of the basin and the hydrology of the lake are fairly well studied, the limnological history and age of Lake Ohrid are largely unknown. Age estimates in the literature vary from 2-10 My with the relevant data mostly being very old.
Therefore, the SCOPSCO program aims at drilling several sites in Lake Ohrid, with the deepest one having a depth of some 700 m. Major goals of the campaign are to a) unravel age and geological evolution of Lake Ohrid, b) reconstruct environmental changes over the past 2-3 Mio. years, and c) combine information on its geological and biological evolution in order to unravel processes that have led to the extraordinary degree of endemic biodiversity in the lake.
The SCOPSCO program is the first ICDP project worldwide that is primarily conducted for evolutionary purposes. At the same time, supplementary projects aim at utilizing DNA data and molecular clock approaches in order to reconstruct the evolutionary history of selected groups of endemic species. The combination of both approaches, deep drilling and DNA analyses, allows for testing specific hypotheses relative to the effect of environmental changes on speciation processes.