Category Archives: transfer function

Reproducibility of high resolution reconstruction – one year on

Posted on 11/10/2020 by richard telford

It is about a year since my paper discussing the reproducibility of high resolution reconstructions was finally published, so I thought I should give a full account of what has happened since. Nothing. None of the authors of the papers … Continue reading →

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Erroneous information … was given

Posted on 23/11/2019 by richard telford

By coincidence, days after I wrote about the apparently very low midge counts in Hiidenvesi, the authors published a correction. Erroneous information considering Chironomidae and Chaoboridae accumulation was given in Figure 4 published in Luoto et al. (2017). Therefore, it … Continue reading →

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Count-less chironomids?

Posted on 01/09/2019 by richard telford

Most papers that present microfossil assemblages report (not always accurately) the minimum number of microfossils that were counted in each sample, an important indicator of the precision of the data. Some do not. For these papers, the reader should be … Continue reading →

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Autocorrelation in the testate amoeba calibration set

Posted on 10/12/2018 by richard telford

Amesbury et al examine the autocorrelation in their huge calibration set. I thought I would do the same, increasing the resolution of the analysis to get a better handle on what is going on. This is an RNE plot. It … Continue reading →

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Testing testate amoeba: some comments on Amesbury et al (2018)

Posted on 01/12/2018 by richard telford

Today, I have been reading and thinking about a new paper presenting a huge testate-amoeba calibration set for reconstructing water table depth in bogs (Amesbury et al 2018). This calibration set, with almost 2000 samples, is the synthesis of many … Continue reading →

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Introducing ggpalaeo

Posted on 29/11/2018 by richard telford

I’ve put some code I used for plotting figures for my soon-to-be-resubmitted manuscript into a package because I thought it might be useful to others. The main use of ggpalaeo is to make ggplot2 plots of transfer function diagnostics from … Continue reading →

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Chironomids are cunning wee beasties

Posted on 09/09/2018 by richard telford

Since I had examined almost every aspect of the data from the remarkable Lake Żabińskie chironomid-inferred August air temperature reconstruction, some time last summer I thought that I would, for completeness, have a quick look at the instrumental temperature data. … Continue reading →

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A mean wind blows over Lake Żabińskie

Posted on 06/08/2018 by richard telford

I have largely neglected the chrysophyte-inferred reconstructions of winter severity and summer calcium concentrations/zonal wind speed from Lake Żabińskie even though they fall within the scope of my review of sub-decadal resolution reconstructions. This is not because I think this … Continue reading →

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Pollen from the garden of forking paths

Posted on 04/08/2018 by richard telford

Most transfer functions for reconstructing past environmental changes are based on a calibration-in-space approach, with a modern calibration set of paired microfossil assemblages and environmental data. The alternative approach is calibration-in-time, with well-dated fossil assemblages and contemporaneous environmental data. I’ve … Continue reading →

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The third chironomid calibration-in-time reconstruction

Posted on 23/07/2018 by richard telford

Most reconstructions of past environmental conditions derived from chironomid assemblages with transfer functions use a calibration-in-space approach, in which the calibration is a set of modern chironomid assemblages paired with modern environmental data. I am aware of three chironomid calibration-in-time … Continue reading →

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