Sprecher
Beschreibung
It is in the best interest of any field to ensure that cutting-edge analytical tools remain both user-friendly and accessible to the broader scientific community. As fossil plants are increasingly utilized in deep-time climatology, the deployment of web-hosted tools (such as ‘CLAMP Online’) and R packages (such as DiLP) has paved the way towards an era in which any palaeobotanist, regardless of methodological expertise, may contribute meaningfully to our knowledge of Earth’s ancient climates. Here, we present a new tool that allows users to perform nearest living relative palaeoclimate analyses through interaction with a simple interface. Users enter a list of extant taxa, after which the climatic envelope of each taxon is imported from our database and the most probable climate in which all taxa co-occur is determined using a probability density approach. Separately, our tool also allows users to input palaeoclimatic variables obtained from other proxies and calculate a conservative ensemble result. This is achieved through unweighted Monte Carlo resampling utilizing the mean and standard deviation of each variable, allowing for the generation of conservative ensemble palaeoclimate estimates. By creating this tool, we aim to improve the accessibility, usability, and deployment of nearest living relative and ensemble palaeoclimate methods, which are currently underutilized when compared to leaf physiognomic palaeoclimate analyses.