FORSENS: Tropical Forest Palaeoecology from Two Ecuadorian Lakes

Two sedimentary archives from Ecuadorian lakes, Laguna Pindo and Laguna Baños, provide raw proxy data spanning up to 50,000 years. The data includes pollen, charcoal, chironomids, stable isotopes, and XRF analyses, collected as part of a NERC fellowship and published in a 2016 Climatic Past study. Data is presented primarily in Excel spreadsheets without mathematical treatment.

Use Cases

• Modeling past temperature changes based on chironomid assemblages mentioned in the description.
• Analyzing long-term vegetation dynamics based on pollen and non-pollen palynomorph data.
• Reconstructing fire history and its drivers based on charcoal records.
• Correlating climatic events with geochemical signals based on stable isotope and XRF data.

Strengths

• Covers a long temporal range, with one lake spanning the last 50,000 years.
• Includes multiple complementary proxies (pollen, charcoal, chironomids, isotopes, XRF) for cross-validation.
• Data is raw and untreated, allowing for flexible reanalysis.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and file formats are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to the two specific lake sites in Ecuador.

Provenance

Source

British Geological Survey (BGS), associated with NERC grant NE/J018562/1.

Collection Method

Palaeoecological analysis of radiocarbon-dated lake sediment cores.

Time Range

Laguna Pindo: last 50,000 years. Laguna Baños: last 6,500 years.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-09 08:31:14.937536; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Two lakes in Ecuador: Laguna Pindo (1250 m asl) and Laguna Baños (3800 m asl).