WP 4: Biodiversity changes at centennial time scales

Lead Institution: University of Oxford

Work Package Leader: Dr. Marc Macias-Fauria

Objectives:

WP4 will focus on i) generating long-term records of key biodiversity variables and ii) studying their spatiotemporal dynamics as related to changes in climate, cryospheric processes, and human agency. Objectives are to:

• Determine the variability of key biodiversity and ecosystem state variables across the terrestrial Arctic ecosystems during the Holocene.
• Study the relationships between these variables and changes in climate, cryospheric processes, and human agency.
• Analyse the temporal stability of these responses, and whether they are in agreement with the more recent observational record (WPs 1&2) and state-of-the-art process-understanding of the Arctic System (WP5). To achieve the above main objectives, WP4 will:
• Identify the key data gaps in paleo-ecological proxy records across the pan-Arctic. The geographical scope is pan-Arctic and the temporal scope is the Holocene (the past 11,500 years), with a focus on the last 2 millennia.

CHARTER Researchers and Associates, WP 4