Replicability and variability of the recent macrofossil and proxy-climate record from raised bogs: field stratigraphy and macrofossil data from Bolton Fell Moss and Walton Moss, Cumbria, England

A proxy record of late Holocene climate change from May Moss, northeast England

“…The lawn-hollow-pool environments of raised mires are believed to be more climatically sensitive than hummocks (Barber, 1981;Barber et al, 1994aBarber et al, , 1998Mauquoy and Barber, 1999); whereas hummock stratigraphies from upland blanket mires have proven invaluable archives of palaeoclimatic (2001) information (Tallis, 1994(Tallis, , 1995Tallis and Livett, 1994). Studies of lowland raised mires suggest that a single palaeohydrological profile can be regarded as representative of an entire site (Barber, 1981;Barber et al, 1994aBarber et al, , 1998. This assumption needs to be corroborated for new sites by assessing the field stratigraphy in detail or by analysing more than one profile.…”

“…ad 1700-1800. Peat sequences in western Ireland (Blackford and Chambers, 1995), Cumbria (Barber et al, 1994a(Barber et al, , 1998 and north Pennines (Mauquoy and Barber, 1999) signify equivalent complexity in the climate history for the past 500 yr. Similarities between the proxy palaeoclimate data from May Moss and other peatland archives across northwest Europe emphasises that peat stratigraphy is clearly capable of recording proxy climate information at sufficiently high resolution to uncover structure within periods such as the LIA.…”

Raised peat bog development and possible responses to environmental changes during the mid- to late-Holocene. Can the palaeoecological record be used to predict the nature and response of raised peat bogs to future climate change?

“…Sub-fossil plant macrofossils preserved in peat samples can be used to reconstruct vegetation succession in raised peat bogs at both the microform scale (when a single borehole is collected to reconstruct vegetation changes in hummock/hollow complexes, see McMullen et al 2004) or at the mesoform scale (when a transect of boreholes is investigated across a single raised peat bog (see Svensson 1988;Barber et al 1998;Hughes et al 2000). When 14 C dating is used to establish a chronology for these peat sequences, centennial and millennial records of vegetation succession can be identiWed, although many of these chronologies are imprecise due to the nature of 14 C calibration (see Mauquoy et al 2004a).…”

Mid- to late-Holocene vegetational and land-use change in the Hadrian's Wall region: a radiocarbon-dated pollen sequence from Crag Lough, Northumberland, England

“…The fourteenth century was a time of particular disruption, with Scottish raids, livestock disease (1315-1322) and the Black Death (1348-1350 and the 1360s) [71]. Data from mires suggest that climate became wetter in the twelfth-thirteenth centuries and after, with a short-lived dry period in the sixteenth century [4,42,52,53]. Shifts in emphasis between particular crops d such as a period with little Hordeum-type but frequent Avena-type and Secale cereale in approximately the thirteenth/ fourteenth centuries d might reflect a response to this climate downturn.…”

“…Mires have also provided information on longer-term regional vegetation history [18,30,34,55,59,60,65,66,78] and climate change [2][3][4]44,52,53]. These studies suggest that much of the landscape within ca.…”