LegacyAge 1.0: Harmonized Chronologies for 2,831 Global Pollen Records

Late Quaternary pollen data from 2,831 records harmonized into a single chronology framework. The dataset includes age control points and metadata from the Neotoma Paleoecology Database and supplementary Asian sources. It was created by Chenzhi Li at the Alfred-Wegener-Institut Helmholtz-Zentrum für Polar- und Meeresforschung and is accompanied by R code for calculation and comparison.

Use Cases

• Reconstructing past vegetation changes based on harmonized pollen chronologies.
• Calibrating or validating climate models using synchronized late Quaternary environmental data.
• Comparing original and harmonized age-depth models for individual pollen records.
• Conducting meta-analyses of global pollen data with standardized temporal frameworks.

Strengths

• Contains harmonized chronologies for 2,831 individual pollen records.
• Includes machine-readable age control points and metadata for each record.
• Provides accompanying R code and visual outputs (graphs, video) for reproducibility.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count per record is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for specific analyses.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

Neotoma Paleoecology Database and supplementary Asian datasets.

Collection Method

Harmonization and calculation of chronologies from existing pollen records.

Time Range

Late Quaternary.

Geography

Global.