Loughborough University is a top-ten rated university in England for research intensity (REF2014) and an outstanding 66% of the work of Loughborough’s academic staff who were eligible to be submitted to the REF was judged as ‘world-leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’, compared to a national average figure of 43%. In choosing Loughborough for your research, you’ll work alongside academics who are leaders in their field. You will benefit from comprehensive support and guidance from our Doctoral College, including tailored careers advice, to help you succeed in your research and future career. Tropical freshwater lakes are critical natural systems of global importance, providing vital ecosystem services to some of Earth’s fastest growing and most vulnerable human populations, yet are scientifically under researched. Tropical lakes are excellent natural laboratories in which to study ecological responses to such environmental stressors, both at a community level (e.g. functional and taxonomic biodiversity) and for individual groups or species. In particular, tropical lakes provide exciting opportunities to explore evolutionary processes for keystone aquatic organisms. Daphnia spp. (water fleas) are ideal for such studies as they have both fast generational turnover, and produce eggs in protective cases, which can be hatched from seedbanks in lake sediments. This PhD will address these questions in the lake-rich region of equatorial western Uganda, where there are ~100 crater lakes, together comprising a globally important ecoregion and acting as a natural aquatic laboratory, within landscapes often heavily impacted by human activity. This project combines contemporary limnology, ecology, and palaeolimnology (and specifically experimental ecology, genomics and “resurrection ecology”) across a suite of contrasting crater lakes in western Uganda. The aim is to characterise aquatic ecological response to environmental change over the last c.100-150 years. Outcomes of this project will shed new light on evolutionary responses of keystone aquatic species to environmental perturbations (e.g. climate change, eutrophication) with wide applicability.