BIOME 6000
Latin America
The biome reconstructions for Latin America are being made as part of a three year programme of research within the Faculty of Biology, University of Amsterdam (R.A. Marchant, H. Hooghiemstra) and in collaboration with the Max-Planck-Institute for BioGeoChemistry at Jena (S. Harrison, I.C. Prentice).
Other scientists collaborating in the project are: Markgraf, V., Behling, H., Björck, S., Bush, M., Cleef, A., De Oliveira, P.E., Graf, K., Hansen, B.C.S., Heusser, C., Horn, S.P., Ledru, M-P., Leyden, B.W., Lozano-García, M.S., Lorrenzo, S., Moar, N.T., Moreno, P.I., Salgado-Labouriau, M.L. Schäbitz, F., van Reenen, G., Watts, W.A.
Biome reconstruction from pollen data for Latin America
Biome reconstructions have been applied to most regions throughout the world, Latin America and Australia being the last geographically large areas to be completed. It has been demonstrated that the method developed in temperate latitudes is able to reconstruct the major Biomes present in Latin America with a high confidence level. With this confidence it is possible to reconstruct past vegetation, and patterns of change. At 6000 yr B.P. there are regional patterns of change from the modern reconstruction. These changes in Biome assignment can be interpreted climatically as a warming and/or drying in some areas and a cooling and or/wetting in others. At 18000 yr B.P. the picture is more uniform; with a general cooling and drying reflected in Biome changes. However, some sites, particularly those in Central Mexico, remain unchanged in their Biome assignments although the affinities that these sites have to a specific Biome are changed.
Over the next three years the current research will (1) refine the current Biome reconstructions, both in space and time by concentrating on high resolution investigations in areas where the data are of a sufficient quality, (2) contribute to data model comparison efforts ongoing in the Palaeoclimatic Modeling Intercomparison Project (PMIP), (3) collaborate with similar research initiatives in neighboring areas to carry out inter-hemispheric and inter-tropical comparisons of vegetation response to climatic forcing, and (4) to manage the Latin American Pollen Database (LAPD) and provide a series of training workshops to empower other data contributors to carry out some of the exciting research that the LAPD can fuel.
