Jeannine-Marie St. Jacques

A global multiproxy database for temperature reconstructions of the Common Era

Reproducible climate reconstructions of the Common Era (1 CE to present) are key to placing industrial-era warming into the context of natural climatic variability. Here we present a community-sourced database of temperature-sensitive proxy records from the PAGES2k initiative. The database gathers 692 records from 648 locations, including all continental regions and major ocean basins. The records are from trees, ice, sediment, corals, speleothems, documentary evidence, and other archives. They range in length from 50 to 2000 years, with a median of 547 years, while temporal resolution ranges from biweekly to centennial. Nearly half of the proxy time series are significantly correlated with HadCRUT4.2 surface temperature over the period 1850–2014. Global temperature composites show a remarkable degree of coherence between high- and low-resolution archives, with broadly similar patterns across archive types, terrestrial versus marine locations, and screening criteria. The database is suited to investigations of global and regional temperature variability over the Common Era, and is shared in the Linked Paleo Data (LiPD) format, including serializations in Matlab, R and Python.

Mid-Holocene hemlock decline and diatom communities in van Nostrand Lake, Ontario, Canada

Terrestrial ecosystem disturbances inferred from the fossil hemlock pollen decline (ca. 4,800 BP) and recovery (ca. 3,800 BP) affected van Nostrand Lake, including the diatom communities. Ecological models suggest the lake responded by eutrophying, reflecting higher nutrient influx resulting from increased erosion. A decline in lake productivity followed as the forest vegetation recovered and erosion slowed. Lastly, as the forest switched from early and middle successional species to mature species, lake productivity increased as erosion increased nutrient inflow, especially phosphorus. However, this eutrophication response was delayed or buffered, perhaps due to wetland development surrounding the lake. The lake never fully returned to its initial, pre-hemlock decline state, but oscillated between more eutrophic and more mesotrophic or oligotrophic stages, possibly reflecting other disturbances in the catchment and climatic change.

The Bias and Signal Attenuation Present in Conventional Pollen-Based Climate Reconstructions as Assessed by Early Climate Data from Minnesota, USA

The inference of past temperatures from a sedimentary pollen record depends upon the stationarity of the pollen-climate relationship. However, humans have altered vegetation independent of changes to climate, and consequently modern pollen deposition is a product of landscape disturbance and climate, which is different from the dominance of climate-derived processes in the past. This problem could cause serious signal distortion in pollen-based reconstructions. In the north-central United States, direct human impacts have strongly altered the modern vegetation and hence the pollen rain since Euro-American settlement in the mid-19th century. Using instrumental temperature data from the early 1800s from Fort Snelling (Minnesota), we assessed the signal distortion and bias introduced by using the conventional method of inferring temperature from pollen assemblages in comparison to a calibration set from pre-settlement pollen assemblages and the earliest instrumental climate data. The early post-settlement calibration set provides more accurate reconstructions of the 19th century instrumental record, with less bias, than the modern set does. When both modern and pre-industrial calibration sets are used to reconstruct past temperatures since AD 1116 from pollen counts from a varve-dated record from Lake Mina, Minnesota, the conventional inference method produces significant low-frequency (centennial-scale) signal attenuation and positive bias of 0.8-1.7°C, resulting in an overestimation of Little Ice Age temperature and likely an underestimation of the extent and rate of anthropogenic warming in this region. However, high-frequency (annual-scale) signal attenuation exists with both methods. Hence, we conclude that any past pollen spectra from before Euro-American settlement in this region should be interpreted using a pre-Euro-American settlement pollen set, paired to the earliest instrumental climate records. It remains to be explored how widespread this problem is when conventional pollen-based inference methods are used, and consequently how seriously regional manifestations of global warming have been underestimated with traditional pollen-based techniques.

Detection and attribution of variability and trends in streamflow records from the Canadian Prairie Provinces

Emerging period of record trends and low frequency (i.e. centennial-scale) variability were examined in streamflow records over the entire Canadian Prairie Provinces. The average record length was 52 years, with the longest record spanning 1911–2010. A modified Mann-Kendall trend analysis showed decreasing flows in Alberta and in southwestern Saskatchewan, no significant trends in the central Prairies and increased flows in Manitoba. Using composite analysis, this study also detected the impacts of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), the North Pacific Index (NPI), the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Pacific North American mode (PNA) on mean daily discharge. There are increased flows during the negative phases of the PDO and PNA, La Niña events and weak Aleutian lows, and decreased flows during the positive phases of the PDO, El Niño and strong Aleutian lows. A much weaker effect of the Arctic Oscillation (AO) was detected. The ~60-year cycle of the PDO has important implications for the recognition of emerging trends in streamflow in response to global climate change. Separation of an emerging consistent trend from the confounding transient trend from PDO phase was greatly facilitated by streamflow time series that span at least one and a half PDO cycles.

Lateglacial and Holocene paleoenvironmental changes recorded in lake sediments, Brock Plateau (Melville Hills), Northwest Territories, Canada

Sediments from South Lake, Brock Plateau (Melville Hills), Northwest Territories, provide one of the longest postglacial records from the mainland western Canadian Arctic, outside of eastern Beringia. Sedimentation commenced at least 13 900 cal. yr BP, and possibly as early as 16 000 cal. yr BP, in response to early deglaciation of the site. Pollen is present throughout the record, with an initial Artemisia-Salix assemblage indicative of very cold conditions, consistent with a locally severe Younger Dryas Stade or simply continued proximity of the Laurentide Ice Sheet margin (c. 12 700 to 11 500 cal. yr BP). At c. 11 000 cal. yr BP, abiotic proxies signal a transition to warmer conditions, corroborated by a pollen assemblage dominated by Betula and Cyperaceae. Although South Lake was biologically productive during the early Holocene (c. 11 000 to 7000 cal. yr BP), diatoms and other siliceous organisms are notably absent from the record, suggesting severe silica limitation. Rises in Alnus crispa and Picea mariana pollen at c. 7000 cal. yr BP suggest cooling and/or an increase in effective moisture. Wetter conditions and increased hydrological inputs and silica supply likely led to the establishment of a pioneering diatom community at c. 6500 cal. yr BP. Decreased organic sedimentation after c. 2000 cal. yr BP suggests cooler conditions. Additionally, changing niveo-eolian deposition of sand on lake ice varied with a c. 3000-year periodicity through the entire record. The South Lake multiproxy record supports the hypothesis that the Brock Plateau was one of the earliest deglaciated regions during the late Wisconsinan.

Data Descriptor: A global multiproxy database for temperature reconstructions of the Common Era

PAGES, a core project of Future Earth, is supported by the U.S. and Swiss National Science Foundations. Any use of trade, firm, or product names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Government. Some of this work was conducted as part of the North America 2k Working Group supported by the John Wesley Powell Center for Analysis and Synthesis, funded by the U.S. Geological Survey. B. Bauer, W. Gross, and E. Gille (NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information) are gratefully acknowledged for helping assemble the data citations and creating the NCEI versions of the PAGES 2k data records. We thank all the investigators whose commitment to data sharing enables the open science ethos embodied by this project.