Improving and evaluating quantitative palaeoclimatic reconstructions for the Late Glacial and Holocene

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The project aims to improve the methodology for reconstructing Quaternary climate. Climate reconstructions offer the only way of quantifying past climate variability beyond the instrumental period. They are essential for validating climate models which can test hypotheses about processes of climate change and provide scenarios for future climate change. Botanical fossils (pollen and macro remains) are well suited for climate reconstructions, because plants strongly depend on climate. This project aims at implementing and testing an advanced reconstruction method based on Bayesianstatistics which is robust against no analogue situations of past vegetation, but enables reconstructions to be as precise as possible. Reconstructions will be performed and evaluated with the new approach and with established methods for European Late Glacial and Holocene records. The reconstructions are expected to be of great value for data-model comparisons.