Programmes > Par auteur > Drake Nick

Whilst the Holocene African Humid period is perhaps one of the most thoroughly documented and well-dated climate change events, the rate of change to the terrestrial environment and its spatial distribution are poorly understood. Current palaeoenvironmental proxies fail to produce consistent temporal trends on regional ecological conditions due to the proxies encoding different levels of information (e.g. cores from groundwater fed versus precipitation fed lakes yielding conflicting results on the timing of aridification at the end of the AHP). In this paper we present results from the GreenSahara project on ecological change over the course of the AHP in North Africa. Using compound-specific carbon (δ13C) and deuterium (δD) isotopes from organic residues in pottery, to reconstruct vegetation trends and humidity levels, alongside high resolution palaeohydrological maps derived from remote sensing data, we present a new approach for mapping terrestrial ecological change.