1 research outputs found
The ACER pollen and charcoal database: a global resource to document vegetation and fire response to abrupt climate changes during the last glacial period
Quaternary records provide an opportunity to examine the nature of the
vegetation and fire responses to rapid past climate changes comparable in
velocity and magnitude to those expected in the 21st-century. The best
documented examples of rapid climate change in the past are the warming events
associated with the Dansgaard–Oeschger (D–O) cycles during the last glacial
period, which were sufficiently large to have had a potential feedback through
changes in albedo and greenhouse gas emissions on climate. Previous
reconstructions of vegetation and fire changes during the D–O cycles used
independently constructed age models, making it difficult to compare the
changes between different sites and regions. Here, we present the ACER (Abrupt
Climate Changes and Environmental Responses) global database, which includes
93 pollen records from the last glacial period (73–15 ka) with a temporal
resolution better than 1000 years, 32 of which also provide charcoal records.
A harmonized and consistent chronology based on radiometric dating (14C,
234U∕230Th, optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), 40Ar∕39Ar-dated tephra
layers) has been constructed for 86 of these records, although in some cases
additional information was derived using common control points based on event
stratigraphy. The ACER database compiles metadata including geospatial and
dating information, pollen and charcoal counts, and pollen percentages of the
characteristic biomes and is archived in Microsoft AccessTM at
https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.870867