A meta-database of Holocene sediment cores for England

Abstract

The nal publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00334-015-0515-1. Additional information:Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. AbstractExtracting sediment cores for palaeoecological and archaeological investigations has occurred extensively across England since the early 20th century. Surprisingly, there has been comparatively little collation of these valuable publications and potential sources of data; for example, a search on the European Pollen Database (1st Aug 2014 edition) found just 118 core sites for the whole of Great Britain. Here, using a combination of systematic meta-searching and knowledge of the unpublished ('grey') literature, we have assembled a metadatabase of some 763 sediment cores for palaeoecological records, documented across 273 scientific studies.The majority of these (>90%) were sediment cores upon which pollen analyses had been performed, but other types of evidence, such as plant macrofossil and faunal records were also identified. We are making this metadatabase publicly available, in the hope that it will assist further investigations into Holocene vegetation history, palaeoecology, geoarchaeology and environmental change.

A meta-database of peatland palaeoecology in Great Britain

“…Key to answering fundamental Holocene palaeoecological questions therefore are studies which bring together multiple individual records. However, there have been surprisingly few attempts to compile the published data, even for regions that have been intensively researched (Coles et al, 1998;Battarbee et al, 2011;Suggitt et al, 2015). Such compilations have an important role as a source of data for secondary analysis, a guide to the literature for future researchers and to highlight important trends and biases.…”

“…Methods: Producing the compilation 1) Search approach We used multiple data sources in producing this compilation: First we exploited existing databases of palaeoecological studies. We found the most useful of these to be the English Core Record Meta-database (Suggitt et al, 2015), the Scottish Palaeoecological Archive Database (Coles et al, 1998) and the European Pollen Database (Fyfe et al, 2009). We inspected all records within our search region and extracted and examined those where details recorded in the database suggested studies that met our search criteria (see below).…”