HR: 1340h
AN: PP53A-1385    [Abstracts]
TI: Improving the usefulness of paleoenvironmental data: moving from archival to research data bases
AU: * Strickland, L E
EM: lstrickland@usgs.gov
AF: US Geological Survey, Box 25046, MS 980 Denver Federal Center, Denver, CO 80225 United States
AU: Thompson, R S
EM: rthompson@usgs.gov
AF: US Geological Survey, Box 25046, MS 980 Denver Federal Center, Denver, CO 80225 United States
AU: Anderson, K H
EM: Katherine.Anderson@colorado.edu
AF: Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research, University of Colorado UCB 450, Boulder, CO 80309 United States
AU: Kerwin, M W
EM: mkerwin@du.edu
AF: University of Denver, 2050 East Iliff Ave., Denver, 80208 United States
AB: Archival databases seek to faithfully represent published data, although sometimes with slight modifications for updated taxonomy or standard descriptions. Over the past decade NOAA, the USGS, other agencies, and groups have produced archival databases for present-day and late-Quaternary North American pollen, woody plant distributions, plant traits, packrat middens, and lake-levels. These archival databases provide valuable information on environmental change, but are of use largely to experts in these fields. With our collaborators, we seek to develop "research databases" that transform, concatenate, and/or summarize paleoenvironmental data in ways that provide meaningful access to a wider community of scientists studying and modeling paleoenvironmental and paleoclimatic change. For example, the USGS/NOAA North American Packrat Midden Dataset is an archival dataset composed of plant macrofossil data derived from packrat middens in western North America. A subsequent research dataset derived from the archival data by transforming raw relative abundance data into standardized presence absence data is of greater use to non-experts. Going a step further, the BIOME6000 project has developed methods to transform disparate arrays of paleobotanical information (stored in separate databases) into uniform descriptions of the past occurrences of plant functional types and biomes. These plant types and biomes can be compared globally and used to test model prediction. Similarly, the interpretation of paleoecological and paleohydrographic data in terms of changes in "effective moisture" by COHMAP provides a means of interpreting synoptic-scale changes in climate, and such changes can be compared with model simulations.
DE: 1600 GLOBAL CHANGE (New category)
DE: 1620 Climate dynamics (3309)
SC: Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology [PP]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting