Diving into the Past: A Paleo Data–Model Comparison Workshop on the Late Glacial and Holocene
Understanding changes in the climate of the late Pleistocene and the Holocene has long been a research topic. Studies rely on different sources of information, ranging from terrestrial and marine archives to a hierarchy of climate modeling activities. In contrast to the climate of the last millennium, novel approaches are necessary to bridge the different temporal and spatial representations of the various archives and the climate models, and to achieve a robust understanding of climate variability and climate processes on centennial-to-millennial time scales.
Holocene fires in the central European lowlands and the role of humans
International audience; A major debate concerns the questions of when and to what extent humans affected regional landscapes, especially land cover and associated geomorphological dynamics, significantly beyond natural variability. Fire is both, a natural component of many climate zones and ecosystems around the globe and also closely related to human land cover change. Humans clearly affected natural fire regimes and landscapes in the most recent centuries, acting as prime ignition triggers and later fire suppressors, while Holocene trends in sedimentary charcoal have been mainly associated with climatic factors and partly with Neolithic land cover change. However, little is known since wh…
Holocene fire activity during low-natural flammability periods reveals scale-dependent cultural human-fire relationships in Europe
Abstract Fire is a natural component of global biogeochemical cycles and closely related to changes in human land use. Whereas climate-fuel relationships seem to drive both global and subcontinental fire regimes, human-induced fires are prominent mainly on a local scale. Furthermore, the basic assumption that relates humans and fire regimes in terms of population densities, suggesting that few human-induced fires should occur in periods and areas of low population density, is currently debated. Here, we analyze human-fire relationships throughout the Holocene and discuss how and to what extent human-driven fires affected the landscape transformation in the Central European Lowlands (CEL). W…
The SISAL database: a global resource to document oxygen and carbon isotope records from speleothems
Stable isotope records from speleothems provide information on past climate changes, most particularly information that can be used to reconstruct past changes in precipitation and atmospheric circulation. These records are increasingly being used to provide “out-of-sample” evaluations of isotope-enabled climate models. SISAL (Speleothem Isotope Synthesis and Analysis) is an international working group of the Past Global Changes (PAGES) project. The working group aims to provide a comprehensive compilation of speleothem isotope records for climate reconstruction and model evaluation. The SISAL database contains data for individual speleothems, grouped by cave system. Stable isotopes of oxyg…