Abstract
High-resolution, easily accessible paleoclimate data are essential for environmental, evolutionary, and ecological studies. The availability of bioclimatic layers derived from climatic simulations representing conditions of the Late Pleistocene and Holocene has revolutionized the study of species responses to Late Quaternary climate change. Yet, integrative studies of the impacts of climate change in the Early Pleistocene and Pliocene – periods in which recent speciation events are known to concentrate – have been hindered by the limited availability of downloadable, user-friendly climatic descriptors. Here we present PaleoClim, a free database of downscaled paleoclimate outputs at 2.5-minute resolution (~5 km at equator) that includes surface temperature and precipitation estimates from snapshot-style climate model simulations using HadCM3, a version of the UK Met Office Hadley Centre General Circulation Model. As of now, the database contains climatic data for three key time periods spanning from 3.3 to 0.787 million years ago: the Marine Isotope Stage 19 (MIS19) in the Pleistocene (~787 ka), the mid-Pliocene Warm Period (~3.264–3.025 Ma), and MIS M2 in the Late Pliocene (~3.3 Ma).
Highlights
Background & SummaryShifts in climate and habitats have key evolutionary and ecological consequences, and are closely associated with contemporary biodiversity patterns[1,2]
Despite the utility of the paleoclimatologies spanning the last 130 Ka, a major impediment to ecological and evolutionary studies is the lack of accessible, high spatial resolution paleoclimatic data in a format directly compatible with most GIS software, those describing earlier time periods
The paleoclimate simulations used here come from the Hadley Centre Coupled Model Version 3 (HadCM3) version of the UK Met Office Unified Model General Circulation Model (GCM)
Summary
Shifts in climate and habitats have key evolutionary and ecological consequences, and are closely associated with contemporary biodiversity patterns[1,2]. Despite the utility of the paleoclimatologies spanning the last 130 Ka, a major impediment to ecological and evolutionary studies is the lack of accessible, high spatial resolution paleoclimatic data in a format directly compatible with most GIS software, those describing earlier time periods. To fill this gap, and given that the most common divergence times between extant sister species have been placed at 1–4 Ma, with relatively few divergence times spanning the last 130 kyrs[17,18], we have developed PaleoClim. The database contains high-resolution terrestrial data for three key periods: Marine Isotope Stage 19 (MIS19) in the Pleistocene (ca. 787 Ka), the mid-Pliocene Warm Period (mPWP, ca. 3.264-3.025 Ma) and Marine Isotope Stage M2 (M2), a glacial interval in the Late Pliocene (ca. 3.3 Ma, Fig. 1)
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