a b s t r a c tWe present a record of peatland development during the last 1000 years from Mauntschas mire in the eastern Swiss Alps (Upper Engadine valley; 1818 m a.s.l.) inferred from testate amoebae (pH and depth to the water table (DWT) reconstructions), stable oxygen isotopes in Sphagnum (d C correlates with DWT only during AD 1000e1570. Part of this apparent instability among the four time series might be attributed to shifts in the local mire conditions which potentially formed very different (non-analogue) habitats. Lack of analogues, caused, for example, by pre-industrial human impact, might have introduced artefacts in the reconstructions, since those habitats are not well represented in some proxy transfer functions. Human impact was probably the main factor for peatland development, distorting most of the climate signals.

We present a 1200 year drought reconstruction for the European Alpine region based on carbon isotope variations of tree rings from living larch trees and historic timber. The carbon isotope fractionation at the study site is sensitive to summer precipitation, temperature, and irradiance, resulting in a stable and high correlation with a drought index for interannual to decadal frequencies and possibly beyond (r 2 = 0.58 for 1901-2004, July/August). When combining this information with maximum latewood density-derived summer temperature, a strongly reduced occurrence of summer droughts during the warm A.D. 900-1200 period is evident, coinciding with the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA), with a shift to colder and drier conditions for the subsequent centuries. The warm-wet MCA contrasts strongly with the climate of the drought-prone warm phase of the recent decades, indicating different forcing mechanism for these two warm periods and pointing to beneficial conditions for agriculture and human well-being during the MCA in this region.

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When investigating someone's hair a single lock is cut, washed, extracted and analysed. The forensic institutes in Switzerland agreed to retain a second lock for a possible reassessment. We were interested in the reproducibility of the concentrations of analytes in hair locks taken from different areas of the head of the same person covering the same time period. Therefore we analysed ethyl glucuronide and caffeine as model substances in 10 hair locks from three individuals categorised as social drinkers. The individual coefficients of variation varied between 14% and 28% for ethyl glucuronide and between 13% and 62% for caffeine corresponding to factors of 1.6 to 4.2 for the highest to the lowest concentrations between the hair locks. This finding has a significant importance both when the second hair lock has to be analysed in a forensic case and if the interpretation of the result is depending on a cut-off value.