NOAA/WDS Paleoclimatology - LAKE STATUS RECORDS FROM EUROPE: DATA BASE DOCUMENTATION

The report (Yu and Harrison, 1995) documents reconstructions of long-term changes in lake status from 118 lakes from Europe. Please consult the full version of the documentation, which is briefly summarized in this README file. Earlier versions of this data base have been used for environmental and climatic reconstructions by Harrison et al. (1991), Prentice et al. (1992), Harrison et al. (1993), Harrison and Digerfeldt (1993), and Guiot et al. (1993). The present version of the European Lake Status Data Base (ELSDB.1, December 1994) has been transferred to the National Geophysical Data Center in order to make the reconstructions freely available to the international scientific community. The construction of the ELSDB is a contribution to an ongoing international effort to produce a new global lake data base (Harrison and Winkler, 1992) designed to be used to validate climate models. The structure of the ELSDB therefore parallels other regional data bases that have been or are being compiled under the auspices of this international effort, such as the FSU and Mongolia Lake Status Data Base (Tarasov et al., 1994) and the African Lake Status Data Base (Damnati and Harrison, in prep.). The data base contains fully documented and coded records from 118 sites across Europe. The data base was compiled by extracting information on changes in lake status from existing lithologic or biostratigraphic data. Most of the sites included in the data base have continuous Holocene records; many have late glacial records and about six sites along the western seaboard and in southern Europe have records extending to or beyond the last glacial maximum. A complete documentation exists for every site, describing the primary data, basin characteristics and the interpretation logic. The sites chosen for inclusion have been screened to meet standards of dating control and consistency among different climatic indicators. Records or parts of records where water depth appears to have been influenced by non-climatic factors, such a tectonism, hydroseral development or human impact, or by factors where the climatic influence is indirect, such as sea-level changes, glacier fluctuations or fluvial influence, have been excluded from the data base. A total of 176 basins have been excluded from the data base because they do not meet these standards (see NONDATA.XLS in Appendix A). The data base consists of documentation files (EULAKE.DOC and EUREF.DOC) and summary tables (EUDATA.XLS, EUSTATUS.XLS, EUDATLST.XLS, EUDATCN.XLS, EUELEV.XLS and NONDATA.XLS). In both the documentation files (Sections 3 and 4) and the summary tables (Appendix A), the sites are arranged by country, where the country order is alphabetical. Within each country the order of the basins is alphabetical. EUDATA.XLS This is an Excel 4.0 file containing primary information: Lake name, country, latitude, longitude, elevation, type of basin, basin origin and geology, area of basin, area of lake and mire, mean and maximum depth of lake, number of 14C dates, record length, data sources, status coding, primary references, other references, coded by, date of final coding. EUSTATUS.XLS This is an Excel 4.0 file containing: Site name, latitude, longitude, collapsed status codings. EUDATLST.XLS This is an Excel 4.0 file containing: Lake name, country, latitude, longitude, total number of 14C dates, lab. number, 14C date, positive error and negative error, description of material, depth of sample, core/profile name, and comments. EUDATCN.XLS This is an Excel 4.0 file containing : Site name, status coding, collapsed status coding, dating-method control, dating control and time point information. EUELEV.XLS This is an Excel 4.0 file containing: Site name, latitude, longitude, lake elevation, basin area and mean basin area, lake area, z-ratio, catchment parameters, references. NODATA.XLS This is an Excel 4.0 file containing information about sites excluded from ELSDB.1, including lake name, country, comments, references, if documented.