Abstract
The variability of climate has profoundly impacted a wide range of macroecological processes in the Late Quaternary. Our understanding of these has greatly benefited from palaeoclimate simulations, however, high-quality reconstructions of ecologically relevant climatic variables have thus far been limited to a few selected time periods. Here, we present a 0.5° resolution bias-corrected dataset of global monthly temperature, precipitation, cloud cover, relative humidity and wind speed, 17 bioclimatic variables, annual net primary productivity, leaf area index and biomes, covering the last 120,000 years at a temporal resolution of 1,000–2,000 years. We combined medium-resolution HadCM3 climate simulations of the last 120,000 years with high-resolution HadAM3H simulations of the last 21,000 years, and modern-era instrumental data. This allows for the temporal variability of small-scale features whilst ensuring consistency with observed climate. Our data make it possible to perform continuous-time analyses at a high spatial resolution for a wide range of climatic and ecological applications - such as habitat and species distribution modelling, dispersal and extinction processes, biogeography and bioanthropology.
Highlights
Background & SummaryGlobal climate in the Late Quaternary has played a major role in the formation of a wide range of macroecological patterns
Climate models can provide the spatial coverage that localised empirical reconstructions are lacking, yet, currently available simulation data for the Late Pleistocene and the Holocene suffer from one of two drawbacks that limit their use for ecological applications
A number of equilibrium and transient simulations, from general circulation models (e.g. HadCM36) or earth system models of intermediate complexity (e.g. LOVECLIM4), provide reconstructions at a high temporal resolution, the relatively low spatial resolution of the simulated data, and significant biases when compared to empirical observations[7], make additional curating of model outputs necessary in order to generate ecologically meaningful data
Summary
Global climate in the Late Quaternary has played a major role in the formation of a wide range of macroecological patterns. Climate models can provide the spatial coverage that localised empirical reconstructions are lacking, yet, currently available simulation data for the Late Pleistocene and the Holocene suffer from one of two drawbacks that limit their use for ecological applications. Several high-resolution and bias-corrected palaeoclimate datasets provide climatic variables in great spatial detail, but their temporal coverage of the Late Pleistocene and the Holocene is usually limited to a few snapshots of key time periods. A number of these datasets have been made available in readily accessible formats since the mid-2000s, and have since been used extensively in ecological applications: the ecoClimate database[8] provides data for the Mid-Holocene (~6,000 BP) and the Last Glacial Maximum (~21,000 BP); WorldClim[9] contains an additional reconstruction of the Last Interglacial Period (~130,000 BP); paleoClim[10] covers the last 21,000 years. Vegetation for the mid-Holocene, the Last Glacial Maximum and the Last Interglacial, performing well as existing high-resolution snapshots of these time periods
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