Abstract
Extracting sediment cores for palaeoecological and archaeological investigations has occurred extensively across England since the early 20th century. Surprisingly, there has been comparatively little collation of these valuable publications and potential sources of data; for example, a search on the European Pollen Database (1st Aug 2014 edition) found just 118 core sites for the whole of Great Britain. Here, using a combination of systematic meta-searching and knowledge of the unpublished (‘grey’) literature, we have assembled a meta-database of some 763 sediment cores for palaeoecological records, documented across 273 scientific studies. The majority of these (>90 %) were sediment cores upon which pollen analyses had been performed, but other types of evidence, such as plant macrofossil and faunal records were also identified. We are making this meta-database publicly available, in the hope that it will assist further investigations into Holocene vegetation history, palaeoecology, geoarchaeology and environmental change.
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Acknowledgments
This project was funded by Natural England (Ref #: 24837). Conversations with Jacqui Huntley substantially improved our coverage of studies in the North Pennines. We are also grateful to the academic colleagues who gave up their time to participate in the Natural England Evidence Review which preceded this work: Jane Bunting, Frank Chambers, Dan Charman, Mary Edwards, Peter Langdon, Danielle Schreve, Helen Shaw and Nicki Whitehouse.
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Communicated by F. Bittmann.
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334_2015_515_MOESM1_ESM.xlsx
ESM 1 The English sediment core meta-database. It provides details of all studies from which data were extracted. The geographic location, the total number of samples, core ID number and site characteristics are listed for each record. For dated cores, the number of dated samples and their temporal coverage is also given (XLSX 207 kb)
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Suggitt, A.J., Jones, R.T., Caseldine, C.J. et al. A meta-database of Holocene sediment cores for England. Veget Hist Archaeobot 24, 743–747 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-015-0515-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-015-0515-1