New Africa2k paper in QSR

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Published: Friday, 11 November 2016 11:05

Members of PAGES' Africa2k working group published their latest paper in Quaternary Science Reviews today.

Written by David Nash et al., "African hydroclimatic variability during the last 2000 years" presents an extensive assessment and discussion of proxy, historical and instrumental evidence for hydroclimatic variability across the African continent in the last two millennia.

The paper includes a systematic review of African paleomoisture records, reviews hydroclimates from the first millennium AD to the period of recent warming (with a particular focus on the Medieval Climate Anomaly and Little Ice Age) and explores potential drivers of hydroclimate variability.

Access the paper here.

Read more about the Africa2k working group here.
   

VICS report in Eos

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Published: Friday, 11 November 2016 10:22

A workshop report from the first meeting of PAGES' Volcanic Impacts on Climate and Society Working Group (VICS) working group was published yesterday in Eos.

"How Did Climate and Humans Respond to Past Volcanic Eruptions?" discusses how the strongest volcanic eruptions of the past are powerful test cases to predict and prepare for future climate change.

Access the workshop report here.

Sign up to the VICS mailing list here.

Plan for new data standards

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Published: Tuesday, 01 November 2016 16:26

Paleoclimatology is a data-driven science, so being able to share your data, or re-use your colleague’s, is essential. Unfortunately, data standards are currently lacking - a study shows that searching and formatting data takes up to 80% of the time spent analyzing it. PAGES is pleased to collaborate on a grassroots effort to fix this and encourages your involvement.

The EarthCube-supported LinkedEarth project, which contributes to PAGES’ Data Stewardship initiative, is creating a publicly-accessible online database platform, curated by paleoclimate experts, to:
1. foster the development of community standards;
2. enable cutting-edge data-analytic tools to be built and applied to a wider array of datasets than ever before; and
3. support next-generation paleoclimate research.

A discussion about community data standards for paleoclimatology started in June 2016 at the Workshop on Paleoclimate Data Standards and is now continuing online via the LinkedEarth wiki. Interested members of the paleoclimate community are encouraged to join the discussion, participate in the associated polls, and be involved in data standard Working Groups (WGs), centered around paleoclimate archives such as sediment cores, trees, coral, speleothem, etc, in addition to cross-cutting topics like chronologies and uncertainties. The central idea of wikis is that “many hands make light work”, so even 15 minutes of your time can go a long way.

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Varves WG in PNAS

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Published: Tuesday, 25 October 2016 17:00

A new study from the PAGES-endorsed Varves Working Group identifies urban expansion as the reason for low-oxygen rates in European lakes beginning in 1850.

Written by Jean-Philippe Jenny et al. and published yesterday in PNAS, "Urban point sources of nutrients were the leading cause for the historical spread of hypoxia across European lakes" uses a compilation of data from 1500 European watersheds to identify the relative role of different drivers in initiating hypolimnetic hypoxia, a critical indicator of lake health.

The authors also discovered a significant acceleration in the spread of lacustrine hypoxia in the 1900s - well before the general use of commercial fertilizers in the mid-20th century and the onset of supraregional climate warming in the 1970s.

Read the Canadian INRS (Institut national de la recherche scientifique) press release here.

Access the article here.

Read the latest e-news

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Published: Wednesday, 19 October 2016 15:35

Read about the latest PAGES' news, meetings, and opportunities from around the world in this month's e-news.

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Bark beetle paper in J Appl Ecol

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Published: Tuesday, 18 October 2016 17:09

A new paper identifying 25 key questions for research into the impacts of bark beetles was published today in Journal of Applied Ecology.

Written by Jesse Morris et al., "Managing bark beetle impacts on ecosystems and society: priority questions to motivate future research" emphasizes the need to improve outbreak monitoring and detection, educate the public on the ecological role of bark beetles, and develop integrated metrics that facilitate comparison of ecosystem services across sites.

Recent bark beetle outbreaks in North America and Europe have impacted forested landscapes and the provisioning of critical ecosystem services. The scale and intensity of many recent outbreaks are widely believed to be unprecedented.

This paper is the product of the PAGES-supported workshop "Scaling forest insect and pathogen disturbances", held in Santa Fe, USA, in April 2015.

Access the article here.