Session Details

This session will explore the potential and limitations of temporal and spatial multi-site comparisons for studies of past environmental reconstruction and human/environment interactions. Past environmental change within or across regions is usually reconstructed by extrapolating from a limited number of spatial point estimates (coring sites), with resulting spatial uncertainties. Spatial uncertainties are further increased owing to environmental and ecosystem heterogeneity, internal variability, and multiple forcing factors interacting uniquely at each site. Also the timing of proxy events within and between coring sites is often uncertain, owing to, for example, errors in dating and age-modelling, internal variability, problems with extracting signal from noise, and multiple forcing factors expressed distinctly at individual sites. Therefore any spatio-temporal analysis of fossil proxy archives is prone to considerable uncertainties. This session focuses on these uncertainties by discussing case studies and methodological developments. It is hoped that an increased quantification of these uncertainties will enable us to understand better the potential and limitations of fossil proxy data for environmental reconstructions.