This Thesis is dedicated to the identification of issues (local and global stressors) that affected lakes physical and biogeological environment over the last 150 years through sediment-based palaeo-reconstructions. Our researches focussed on the recent development of hypoxia (i.e. low oxygen concentrations) which is a good indicator of lake ecosystem quality at the hypolimnetic scale. The aim is to reconstruct in 3 perialpin lakes (Geneva, Bourget, Annecy), with annual resolution, the evolution of 1) trophic level (Anthropic forcing), 2) flood regime (climate forcing) and 3) hypoxia (hypolimnetic response) in order to identify over time the role of human activity and climate on the lake ecosystem quality. A 4D approach is developed, using 80 sediment cores, to quantify for the first time the low oxygen dynamic and the flood regime from sediment archives. Statistical modelling is used to identify the relation between thermal, hydrological, trophic forcings on the response of hypoxia. 3D modelling is developed to support the results and to make results more understandable to actors of management. The principal findings gather around three topics: 1) Optimisation of spatio-temporal approach to quantify palaeoreconstruction from sediment archives based on volume calculation. Those reconstructions of hypoxia dynamic for the three lakes enable to emphasis the notion of weaken equilibrium, ecosystems vulnerability and the amplification of response following cumulative pressures. 2) New description of hypolimnetic functioning under constant increase of external pressures (with a focus on the nature of transitions between states: threshold effect, saturation effect, hypersteresis). 3) The contribution of palaeoreconstructions and statistical analyses to describe the respective influence of human activity and climate involved on the initiation of lake dysfunction, maintain or rebalancing of hypolimnetic functioning.
