Records of past climate variability and associated vegetation response exist in various regions throughout Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). To date, there has been no coherent synthesis of the existing palaeo-records. During an INTIMATE meeting (Cluj Napoca, Romania) focused on identifying CEE paleo-records, it was decided to address this gap by presenting the palaeo-community with a compilation of high-quality climatic and vegetation records for the past 60-8 kyrs. The compilation should also serve as a reference point for the use in the modelling community working towards the INTIMATE project goals, and in data-model inter-comparison studies. This paper is therefore a compilation of up to date, best available quantitative and semi-quantitative records of past climate and biotic response from CEE covering this period. It first presents the proxy and archive used. Speleothems and loess mainly provide the evidences available for the 60-20 ka interval, whereas pollen records provide the main source of information for the Lateglacial and Holocene. It then examines the temporal and spatial patterns of climate variability inferred from different proxies, the temporal and spatial magnitude of the vegetation responses inferred from pollen records and highlights differences and similarities between proxies and sub-regions and the possible mechanisms behind this variability. Finally, it identifies weakness in the proxies and archives and their geographical distribution. This exercise also provides an opportunity to reflect on the status of research in the area and to identify future critical areas and subjects of research.

a b s t r a c tTerrestrial records of past climatic conditions, such as lake sediments and speleothems, provide data of great importance for understanding environmental changes. However, unlike marine and ice core records, terrestrial palaeodata are often not available in databases or in a format that is easily accessible to the non-specialist. As a consequence, many excellent terrestrial records are unknown to the broader palaeoclimate community and are not included in compilations, comparisons, or modelling exercises. Here we present a compilation of Western European terrestrial palaeo-records covering, entirely or partially, the 60e8-ka INTIMATE time period. The compilation contains 56 natural archives, including lake records, speleothems, ice cores, and terrestrial proxies in marine records. The compilation is limited to include records of high temporal resolution and/or records that provide climate proxies or quantitative reconstructions of environmental parameters, such as temperature or precipitation, and that are of relevance and interest to a broader community. We briefly review the different types of terrestrial archives, their respective proxies, their interpretation and their application for palaeoclimatic reconstructions. We also discuss the importance of independent chronologies and the issue of record Quaternary Science Reviews 106 (2014) 167e185 synchronization. The aim of this exercise is to provide the wider palaeo-community with a consistent compilation of high-quality terrestrial records, to facilitate model-data comparisons, and to identify key areas of interest for future investigations. We use the compilation to investigate Western European latitudinal climate gradients during the deglacial period and, despite of poorly constrained chronologies for the older records, we summarize the main results obtained from NW and SW European terrestrial records before the LGM.

Among abundant reconstructions of Holocene climate in Europe, only a handful has addressed winter conditions, and most of these are restricted in length and/or resolution. Here we present a record of late autumn through early winter air temperature and moisture source changes in East-Central Europe for the Holocene, based on stable isotopic analysis of an ice core recovered from a cave in the Romanian Carpathian Mountains. During the past 10,000 years, reconstructed temperature changes followed insolation, with a minimum in the early Holocene, followed by gradual and continuous increase towards the mid-to-late-Holocene peak (between 4-2 kcal BP), and finally by a decrease after 0.8 kcal BP towards a minimum during the Little Ice Age (AD 1300–1850). Reconstructed early Holocene atmospheric circulation patterns were similar to those characteristics of the negative phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), while in the late Holocene they resembled those prevailing in the positive NAO phase. The transition between the two regimes occurred abruptly at around 4.7 kcal BP. Remarkably, the widespread cooling at 8.2 kcal BP is not seen very well as a temperature change, but as a shift in moisture source, suggesting weaker westerlies and increased Mediterranean cyclones penetrating northward at this time.