Manuel Chevalier

This study presents a detailed pollen-based climate reconstruction from Lake Fúquene, Colombia, spanning the past 284,000 years and revealing significant changes in temperature and hydroclimate modes of variability, particularly between glacial periods. Our findings highlight the central role of eccentricity in modulating the influence of high-latitude glacial climate variability on the northern Andes. During periods of high eccentricity (∼70-260 ka), we conclude that the region was shielded from northern high-latitude glacial ice-sheet dynamics by an intensified Walker circulation. After ∼70 ka, a weakening of this zonal circulation allowed high-latitude, millennial-scale glacial climate variability to penetrate deeper into the tropics, influencing the position of the ITCZ and the rainbelt. This shift in climate dynamics led to increased regional millennial-scale climate variability. A detrended correspondence analysis (DCA) on fossil pollen data highlights a contemporaneous compositional shift previously masked by glacial-interglacial vegetation changes. The observed ecological shift coincides temporally with predictions of elevated speciation rates in mechanistic simulations. Combined, these results suggest a long-lasting environmental impact from glacial millennial-scale climate dynamics, supporting the hypothesis that increased environmental dynamism during glacial periods may trigger the speciation pump in the Northern Andes more than glacial inceptions or terminations. These findings underscore the evolving nature of regional climate drivers and their complex interplay with ecology, offering new insights into the role of climate variability in shaping biodiversity in this hotspot.

Statistical climate reconstruction techniques are fundamental tools to study past climate variability from fossil proxy data. In particular, the methods based on probability density functions (or PDFs) can be used in various environments and with different climate proxies because they rely on elementary calibration data (i.e. modern geolocalised presence data). However, the difficulty of accessing and curating these calibration data and the complexity of interpreting probabilistic results have often limited their use in palaeoclimatological studies. Here, I introduce a new R package (crestr) to apply the PDF-based method CREST (Climate REconstruction SofTware) on diverse palaeoecological datasets and address these problems. crestr includes a globally curated calibration dataset for six common climate proxies (i.e. plants, beetles, chironomids, rodents, foraminifera, and dinoflagellate cysts) associated with an extensive range of climate variables (20 terrestrial and 19 marine variables) that enables its use in most terrestrial and marine environments. Private data collections can also be used instead of, or in combination with, the provided calibration dataset. The package includes a suite of graphical diagnostic tools to represent the data at each step of the reconstruction process and provide insights into the effect of the different modelling assumptions and external factors that underlie a reconstruction. With this R package, the CREST method can now be used in a scriptable environment and thus be more easily integrated with existing workflows. It is hoped that crestr will be used to produce the much-needed quantified climate reconstructions from the many regions where they are currently lacking, despite the availability of suitable fossil records. To support this development, the use of the package is illustrated with a step-by-step replication of a 790 000-year-long mean annual temperature reconstruction based on a pollen record from southeastern Africa.

Fossil pollen records are well-established indicators of past vegetation changes. The prevalence of pollen across environmental settings including lakes, wetlands, and marine sediments, has made palynology one of the most ubiquitous and valuable tools for studying past environmental and climatic change globally for decades. A complementary research focus has been the development of statistical techniques to derive quantitative estimates of climatic conditions from pollen assemblages. This paper reviews the most commonly used statistical techniques and their rationale and seeks to provide a resource to facilitate their inclusion in more palaeoclimatic research. To this end, we first address the fundamental aspects of fossil pollen data that should be considered when undertaking pollen-based climate reconstructions. We then introduce the range of techniques currently available, the history of their development, and the situations in which they can be best employed. We review the literature on how to define robust calibration datasets, produce high-quality reconstructions, and evaluate climate reconstructions, and suggest methods and products that could be developed to facilitate accessibility and global usability. To continue to foster the development and inclusion of pollen climate reconstruction methods, we promote the development of reporting standards. When established, such standards should 1) enable broader application of climate reconstruction techniques, especially in regions where such methods are currently underused, and 2) enable the evaluation and reproduction of individual reconstructions, structuring them for the evolving open-science era, and optimising the use of fossil pollen data as a vital means for the study of past environmental and climatic variability. We also strongly encourage developers and users of palaeoclimate reconstruction methodologies to make associated programming code publicly available, which will further help disseminate these techniques to interested communities.

Across the glacial-interglacial cycles of the late Pleistocene (∼700 k.y.), temperature variability at low latitudes is often considered to have been negligible compared to changes in precipitation. However, a paucity of quantified temperature records makes this difficult to reliably assess. In this study, we used the Bayesian method CREST (Climate REconstruction SofTware) to produce a 790,000 yr quantified temperature reconstruction from a marine pollen record from southeast Africa. The results reveal a strong similarity between temperature variability in subtropical Africa and global ice volume and CO2 concentrations, indicating that temperature in the region was not controlled by local insolation, but followed global trends at these time scales, with an amplitude of ∼4 °C between glacial minima and interglacial maxima. The data also enabled us to make an assessment of the impact of temperature change on pollen diversity, with results showing there is no link between glacial-age temperatures/CO2 and a loss of diversity in this record.

Late Quaternary climate variability in the southern African subtropics is still only poorly resolved, with significant complexity and apparent contradictions in the regional dataset. To more effectively interpret and synthesize key regional records, we reanalysed the data from 13 pollen sequences from the summer rainfall zone of South Africa spanning the last 45,000 years, obtaining directly comparable quantitative reconstructions of mean annual temperature and summer rainfall. Temperature reconstructions from across the region provide consistent results, with all sites reflecting trends observed in southwest Indian Ocean sea-surface temperatures in the adjacent Mozambique Channel. Precipitation reconstructions are more heterogeneous, with two distinct subregions being identified. In the northeast, long-term trends in precipitation are determined by sea-surface and continental temperature trends, revealing a positive relationship between temperature and rainfall. This long-term pattern appears to be primarily driven by high northern latitude mechanisms, with direct local insolation being subordinate. Their relative impact reversed during terminal glacial period/early Holocene, at which time direct insolation forcing became the main driver of rainfall variability. Further south, in central South Africa, precipitation variability appears also to be influenced by the latitudinal position of the Southern Hemisphere westerlies, which combine with tropical flow to create tropical-temperate trough, advecting moisture into the interior. In this region, periods of maximum precipitation coincide with periods of elevated SSTs and equatorward expansions of the westerly storm track. This study allows for a fully constrained understanding of climate dynamics along the eastern African margin for the last 45,000 years, linking dynamics to drivers and describing how the climate systems evolved across the last glacial–interglacial transition.