Recent methodological advances in Quaternary palaeoecological proxies

Abstract

This progress report reviews and assesses recent developments in the analysis and interpretation of palaeoecological proxies that have led to important advances in our understanding of past Quaternary environments that emerge as crucial elements of more robust and reliable predictions of future climates and their ecological implications. Recently discovered archives, or technological advances associated with the biological proxies they contain, are leading to higher resolution and more detailed reconstructions of environments in a wide range of geographical circumstances. There are also important emerging palaeoecological methodologies that enable scientists to reconstruct past environments in greater detail and to apply chronologies that are more precise and accurate. Given these developments, a variety of applications, some of which are more obviously aimed at resolving practical problems in, for example, conservation science and even archaeology, are explored.

Vegetation response to wildfire and climate forcing in a Rocky Mountain lodgepole pine forest over the past 2500 years

“…In pollen diagrams, pollen counts are converted to percentages and then plotted by their depth or by their radiocarbon-derived age (Birks and Berglund, 2018;Edwards et al, 2017). While pollen diagrams alone can provide insight to past vegetation communities, one of the advantages of pollen analysis is that pollen diagrams can be matched with other proxies from within lacustrine cores to capture catchment-wide trends and map ecological impacts that would otherwise be missed if each proxy was analyzed individually (Birks and Birks, 2006;Meadows, 2014;Seppä and Bennett, 2003).…”

Geomorphology in the Anthropocene: Perspectives from the Past, Pointers for the Future?

“…This is certainly a provocative view and to accept it uncritically would be to ignore a great deal of evidence about the sensitivity of the earth to wide range of perturbations beyond those invoked by human activity. There are in fact several ways in which developing robust analyses of past environmental changes can provide a valuable perspective that may lead to more effective management of the environmental challenges of the future, although this requires continued improvement both in methodologies and in the way in which data are provided (McCarroll 2010;Meadows 2014).…”

Experimental Simulation: Using Generative Modeling and Palaeoecological Data to Understand Human-Environment Interactions

“…Large amounts of palaeoecological information, such as that stored in the NEOTOMA and the Global Charcoal databases, are available online, and can be interrogated using open-source software such as R (Blarquez et al, 2014;Goring et al, 2015). Likewise, the variety of proxies available to palaeoecologists has increased (Meadows, 2014), with, for example, ancient genomics providing new data and insights about the ecological dynamics of the ecosystems of the past (Orlando and Cooper, 2014;Hofman et al, 2015). The signatures of past changes and the processes generating them are assumed to be present in the spatial and temporal patterns embedded in these data and given the wealth of data available describing past ecosystems, palaeoecology is now awash, if not drowning, in "patterns" of all sorts.…”