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Publication of the month September

Barrierefreiheit: Kurzbeschreibung des Bildes
“Oscillayers: A dataset for the study of climatic oscillations over Plio‐Pleistocene time‐scales at high spatial‐temporal resolution”
Alexander Gamisch

Abstract: 
In order to understand how species evolutionarily responded to Plio-Pleistocene climate oscillations (e.g. in terms of speciation, extinction, migration and adaptation), it is first important to have a good understanding of those past climate changes per se. This, however, is currently limited due to the lack of global-scale climatic datasets with high temporal resolution spanning the Plio-Pleistocene. To fill this gap, I here present Oscillayers, a global-scale and region-specific bioclim dataset, facilitating the study of climatic oscillations during the last 5.4 million years at high spatial (2.5 arc-minutes) and temporal (10 kyr time periods) resolution. This dataset builds upon interpolated anomalies (Δ layers) between bioclim layers of the present and the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) that are scaled relative to the Plio-Pleistocene global mean temperature curve, derived from benthic stable oxygen isotope ratios, to generate bioclim variables for 539 time periods. Evaluation of the scaled, interpolated estimates of palaeo-climates generated for the Holocene, Last Interglacial and Pliocene showed good agreement with independent General Circulation Models (GCMs) for respective time periods in terms of pattern correlation and absolute differences. Oscillayers thus provides a new tool for studying spatial-temporal patterns of evolutionary and ecological processes at high temporal and spatial resolution.

The open access article can be found  here.
Reviewed by Hans Brandstetter.

CONGRATULATIONS!