Journal article

Identifying coherent patterns of environmental change between multiple, multivariate records: an application to four 1000-year diatom records from Victoria, Australia

JJ Tyler, K Mills, C Barr, JMK Sniderman, PA Gell, DJ Karoly

Quaternary Science Reviews | Published : 2015

Abstract

Empirical orthogonal functions (EOFs) of indirect archives of environmental change are increasingly used to identify coherent trends between palaeoclimate records, to separate externally forced patterns from locally driven idiosyncrasies. Lake sediments are particularly suited to such syntheses: they are abundant in most landscapes and record a wide array of information, yet local complexities often conceal or confuse the climate signal recorded at individual sites. Lake sediment parameters usually exhibit non-linear, multivariate and indirect responses to climate, therefore identifying coherent patterns between two or more lake records presents a complex challenge. Ideally, the selection of..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Awarded by Natural Environment Research Council


Funding Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Gavin Simpson, Peter Minchin and Bob Clarke for their advice on dimension reduction techniques in ecology, Maarten Blaauw for his advice on age-depth modelling and Kevin Anchukaitis and Jessica Tierney for sharing their Matlab code for Monte Carlo Empirical Orthogonal Functions. John Tibby's comments on an earlier version of this manuscript were much appreciated. This research was funded by two Collaborative Research Network (CRN) fellowships to JJT and KM, an Adelaide University Environment Institute grant to JJT, an Australian Postgraduate Award (APA) and an Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering (AINSE) postgraduate research award (AINSTU0104) to CB and an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) to KS. KM publishes with the approval of the Executive Director, British Geological Survey (NERC).