| description: |
The project will develop a regional calibration dataset for Estonia consisting of modern lake sediment pollen and diatom samples and associated vegetational, climatic and limnological variables. These data are used to define transfer functions that relate taxon distribution and abundance to contemporary landscape, climatic and limnological conditions. These inference models will eventually provide better and more realistic quantitative estimates for reconstructing Holocene climatic variability and environmental changes from sedimentary pollen and diatom assemblages. Annually laminated sediment sequences from southern Estonia allow to reconstruct changes in landscape, lake ecosystem and climate at a very high-temporal resolution. Abrupt transitions between time periods of stable climatic conditions, e.g. the early Preboreal Oscillation, a cooling events at ca. 8200 years BP and at ca. 2800¿2700 years BP, the Medieval Warming, the Little Ice Age and environmental changes during last 1000 years are of special interest. Also, quantitative rates of environmental change as well as possible time lags between external forcing (climate change) and induced lake ecosystem response are estimated. |