ALBERT

Beschreibung: Changes in the life cycle of organisms (i.e. phenology) are one of the most widely used early-warning indicators of climate change, yet this remains poorly understood throughout the tropics. We exhaustively reviewed any published and unpublished study on fruiting phenology carried out at the community level in the American tropics and subtropics (latitudinal range: 26°N?26°S) to (1) provide a comprehensive overview of the current status of fruiting phenology research throughout the Neotropics; (2) unravel the climatic factors that have been widely reported as drivers of fruiting phenology; and (3) provide a preliminary assessment of the potential phenological responses of plants under future climatic scenarios. Despite the large number of phenological datasets uncovered (218), our review shows that their geographic distribution is very uneven and insufficient for the large surface of the Neotropics (~ 1 dataset per ~ 78,000 km2). Phenological research is concentrated in few areas with many studies (state of São Paulo, Brazil, and Costa Rica), whereas vast regions elsewhere are entirely unstudied. Sampling effort in fruiting phenology studies was generally low: the majority of datasets targeted fewer than 100 plant species (71%), lasted 2 years or less (72%), and only 10.4% monitored 〉 15 individuals per species. We uncovered only 10 sites with ten or more years of phenological monitoring. The ratio of numbers of species sampled to overall estimates of plant species richness was wholly insufficient for highly diverse vegetation types such as tropical rainforests, seasonal forest and cerrado, and only slightly more robust for less diverse vegetation types, such as deserts, arid shrublands and open grassy savannas. Most plausible drivers of phenology extracted from these datasets were environmental (78.5%), whereas biotic drivers were rare (6%). Among climatic factors, rainfall was explicitly included in 73.4% of cases, followed by air temperature (19.3%). Other environmental cues such as water level (6%), solar radiation or photoperiod (3.2%), and ENSO events (1.4%) were rarely addressed. In addition, drivers were analyzed statistically in only 38% of datasets and techniques were basically correlative, with only 4.8% of studies including any consideration of the inherently autocorrelated character of phenological time series. Fruiting peaks were significantly more often reported during the rainy season both in rainforests and cerrado woodlands, which is at odds with the relatively aseasonal character of the former vegetation type. Given that climatic models predict harsh future conditions for the tropics, we urgently need to determine the magnitude of changes in plant reproductive phenology and distinguish those from cyclical oscillations. Long-term monitoring and herbarium data are therefore key for detecting these trends. Our review shows that the unevenness in geographic distribution of studies, and diversity of sampling methods, vegetation types, and research motivation hinder the emergence of clear general phenological patterns and drivers for the Neotropics. We therefore call for prioritizing research in unexplored areas, and improving the quantitative component and statistical design of reproductive phenology studies to enhance our predictions of climate change impacts on tropical plants and animals.

Beschreibung: The data contain airborne remote sensing spectral measurements in the short-wave infrared as recorded by the MAMAP (Methane Airborne MAPper) instrument during the POLAR 5 campaign AIRMETH in 2011. Included are also calibration measurements using a white light source, a tentative wavelength calibration and a bad pixel mask.

Beschreibung: A 30.5 m sediment core was recovered from the coastal lake Eilandvlei (EV13), which represents a unique high-resolution record of environmental change for southern Africa. For the establishment of a robust chronology, special emphasis was placed on the calibration of radiocarbon (14C) ages obtained from the dating of different material. However, the reliability of 14C ages can be problematic since coastal lakes interact with different source pools providing 14C-depleted ("old") carbon thus causing reservoir effects. The origin of old carbon affecting the EV13 samples was most likely sourced from the Indian Ocean. Two pre-bomb marine molluscan shells were therefore analysed to determine the regional marine reservoir offset (dR), with obtained dR values of 134 ± 38 and 161 ± 38 14C yrs providing the first available data for the south coast of South Africa. However, the application of the resulting average dRmean = 148 ± 27 14C yrs for the calibration of the entire EV13 record underestimates the variable reservoir effects throughout the Holocene. These were possibly caused by past changes in the connectivity between the present lake system and the ocean as well as a varying degree of upwelling in this area. To solve this problem, three sample pairs (each consisting of wood fragments and bulk organic sediment from the same core depth) were dated to calculate the variable past reservoir effects. This approach provided a median basal age of 8920 +200/-250 cal BP. Palaeomagnetic secular variation stratigraphy was used to corroborate the chronology for the topmost 1.5 m of the record (past millennium), thus providing the first Holocene sediment based inclination and declination data from South Africa.

Beschreibung: Paleomagnetic data including inclination, declination, MAD values and MDF are given on an event correct composite depth (ECCD) and age for the composite lacustrine record TAN12-2 from Lake Tangra Yumco, Tibetan Plateau.