1.36 million years of Mediterranean forest refugium dynamics in response to glacial-interglacial cycle strength.

The sediment record from Lake Ohrid (Southwestern Balkans) represents the longest continuous lake archive in Europe, extending back to 1.36 Ma. We reconstruct the vegetation history based on pollen analysis of the DEEP core to reveal changes in vegetation cover and forest diversity during glacial-interglacial (G-IG) cycles and early basin development.

Deep drilling reveals massive shifts in evolutionary dynamics after formation of ancient ecosystem.

The scarcity of high-resolution empirical data directly tracking diversity over time limits our understanding of speciation and extinction dynamics and the drivers of rate changes. Here, we analyze a continuous species-level fossil record of endemic diatoms from ancient Lake Ohrid, along with environmental and climate indicator time series since lake formation 1.36 million years (Ma) ago.

Mediterranean winter rainfall in phase with African monsoons during the past 1.36 million years.

Mediterranean climates are characterized by strong seasonal contrasts between dry summers and wet winters. Changes in winter rainfall are critical for regional socioeconomic development, but are difficult to simulate accurately and reconstruct on Quaternary timescales. This is partly because regional hydroclimate records that cover multiple glacial-interglacial cycles with different orbital geometries, global ice volume and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are scarce.

Columbus' environmental impact in the New World: Land use change in the Yaque River valley, Dominican Republic.

Columbus' arrival in the New World in AD 1492 on the northern coast of Hispaniola was followed by a suite of changes in land-use. We reconstruct environmental change from a 225-cm-long sediment core from site Los Indios from an abandoned and sediment-filled meander of the Yaque River, Cibao Valley, northeastern Dominican Republic. The sediment record starts ca.

Seasonality modulates the predictive skills of diatom based salinity transfer functions.

The value of diatoms as bioindicators in contemporary and palaeolimnological studies through transfer function development has increased in the last decades. While such models represent a tremendous advance in (palaeo) ecology, they leave behind important sources of uncertainties that are often ignored. In the present study we tackle two of the most important sources of uncertainty in the development of diatom salinity inference models: the effect of secondary variables associated to seasonality and the comparison of conventional cross-validation methods with a validation based on independent datasets.

Forensic Comparison of Soil Samples Using Nondestructive Elemental Analysis.

Soil can play an important role in forensic cases in linking suspects or objects to a crime scene by comparing samples from the crime scene with samples derived from items. This study uses an adapted ED-XRF analysis (sieving instead of grinding to prevent destruction of microfossils) to produce elemental composition data of 20 elements. Different data processing techniques and statistical distances were evaluated using data from 50 samples and the log-LR cost (C ).

Multi-Year Leaf-Level Response to Sub-Ambient and Elevated Experimental CO2 in Betula nana.

The strong link between stomatal frequency and CO2 in woody plants is key for understanding past CO2 dynamics, predicting future change, and evaluating the significant role of vegetation in the hydrological cycle. Experimental validation is required to evaluate the long-term adaptive leaf response of C3 plants to CO2 conditions; however, studies to date have only focused on short-term single-season experiments and may not capture (1) the full ontogeny of leaves to experimental CO2 exposure or (2) the true adjustment of structural stomatal properties to CO2, which we postulate is likely to occur over several growing seasons. We conducted controlled growth chamber experiments at 150 ppmv, 450 ppmv and 800 ppmv CO2 with woody C3 shrub Betula nana (dwarf birch) over two successive annual growing seasons and evaluated the structural stomatal response to atmospheric CO2 conditions.

Region-specific sensitivity of anemophilous pollen deposition to temperature and precipitation.

Understanding relations between climate and pollen production is important for several societal and ecological challenges, importantly pollen forecasting for pollinosis treatment, forensic studies, global change biology, and high-resolution palaeoecological studies of past vegetation and climate fluctuations. For these purposes, we investigate the role of climate variables on annual-scale variations in pollen influx, test the regional consistency of observed patterns, and evaluate the potential to reconstruct high-frequency signals from sediment archives. A 43-year pollen-trap record from the Netherlands is used to investigate relations between annual pollen influx, climate variables (monthly and seasonal temperature and precipitation values), and the North Atlantic Oscillation climate index.

Drought stress signals in modern and subfossil Quercus laurifolia (Fagaceae) leaves reflect winter precipitation in southern Florida tied to El Nino-Southern Oscillation activity.

In the present study, structural xeromorphic features in modern and subfossil Quercus laurifolia leaves from southern Florida were quantified to reconstruct past precipitation changes in sensitive terrestrial settings. Absolute cell numbers/mm(2), quantified as epidermal cell density (ED) have been analyzed on leaves from herbarium collections as well as the leaves accumulated during the past 125 years in peat deposits. The results reveal a common principal correlation between the measured ED and winter precipitation (November through March, NDJFM: Herbarium r = -0.

Mid- to late-Holocene El Nino-Southern Oscillation dynamics reflected in the subtropical terrestrial realm.

High resolution pollen analysis of mid- to late-Holocene peat deposits from southwest Florida reveals a stepwise increase in wetland vegetation that points to an increased precipitation-driven fresh water flow during the past 5,000 years. The tight coupling between winter precipitation patterns in Florida and the strength of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) strongly suggests that the paleo-hydrology record reflects changes in ENSO intensity. A terrestrial subtropical record outside the Indo Pacific Warm Pool both documents ecosystem response to the known onset of modern-day ENSO periodicities, between approximately 7,000 and 5,000 years B.