Lateglacial plant macrofossil-based temperature reconstructions for the Baltic states from 14,000 to 11,000 years ago

Liva Trasune, Minna Väliranta, Normunds Stivrins, Leeli Amon, Frederik Schenk, J. Sakari Salonen

The dataset contains quantitative mean air temperature reconstructions of January and July for the period of 14,000 to 11,000 years ago in the region of the Baltic States.

The dataset was created to compare reconstruction results between different methodological choices — climate reconstruction algorithms and different regions used as modern calibration data.

The reconstructions are based on previously published plant macrofossil data from thirteen sites located in the Baltic States and northern Poland.

Citation

Liva Trasune, Minna Väliranta, Normunds Stivrins, Leeli Amon, Frederik Schenk, J. Sakari Salonen (2024) Lateglacial plant macrofossil-based temperature reconstructions for the Baltic states from 14,000 to 11,000 years ago. Dataset version 1. Bolin Centre Database. https://doi.org/10.17043/trasune-2024-lateglacial-climate-1

References

Trasune L, Väliranta M, Stivrins N, Amon L, Schenk F, Sakari JS (2024) A comparison of plant macrofossil-based quantitative climate reconstruction methods: a case study of the Lateglacial Baltic States. Quaternary Science Reviews. (accepted)

Data description

The dataset consists of eight .csv files with climate reconstructions, one .csv file with climate indicator species, one .csv file with the modern taxa data used for the climate–species calibration (derived from GBIF), and one README.md file with the information about the dataset's structure and with references to the publications of sites that were used for the creation of this dataset.

Total file size: 169 MB (compressed 35 MB).

Climate reconstruction files. The files are titled as Trasune_[climate reconstruction algorithm used]_[modern climate dataset used for species-climate calibration]_reconstructions.csv. Each file consists of July and January mean air temperature reconstructions from 13 sites of the Baltic States using multiple different modern calibration regions. For column names, see README.md file:

• Trasune_weightedMCR_CRU_reconstructions.csv
• Trasune_pCRACLE_CRU_reconstructions.csv
• Trasune_nCRACLE_CRU_reconstructions.csv
• Trasune_CREST_CRU_reconstructions.csv
• Trasune_classicMCR_CRU_reconstructions.csv
• Trasune_AllMethods_WC2_reconstructions.csv
• Trasune_AllMethods_WC2wCRUextent_reconstructions.csv

CNDL climate reconstruction files. July air temperatures for Lateglacial climatic events from CNDL approach, and climate indicator species file consisting of the detailed taxa data used for CNDL:

• Trasune_CNDL_reconstructions.csv
• Trasune_CNDL_indicatorspecies.csv

Modern plant occurrence data (taxa with point coordinates) used for species-climate calibration, derived from the GBIF database:

• GBIF_derived_dataset.csv

Comments

Abbreviations

• Modern Climate Datasets:

  • CRU – Climatic Research Unit CL 2.0
  • WC2 – WorldClim Version 2.0

• Climate reconstruction methods:

  • MCR – Mutual Climate Range
  • pCRACLE – parametric Climate Reconstruction Analysis Using Co-Existence Likelihood Estimation
  • nCRACLE – non-parametric Climate Reconstruction Analysis Using Co-Existence Likelihood Estimation
  • CREST – Climate Reconstruction Software
  • CNDL – Common Northern Distribution Limit
  • GBIF – Global Biodiversity Information Facility

Please, refer to the article by Trasune et al. (2024) for further details about methods used.