An AI model developed by a team of scientists from Goethe University Frankfurt and the University of Birmingham, led by Niamh Eastwood and Prof Luisa Orsini, shows in the renowned journal eLife how water pollution, extreme weather events and rising temperatures can change and irreversibly damage the ecosystem of a freshwater lake over many decades. The model, which uses weather and climate data as well as data from a sediment core from a well-studied lake in Denmark, could be used in future to predict how ecosystems react to complex environmental changes. It could therefore serve as a "time machine for biodiversity" that both explains past processes and points to future ecological dangers.