Disentangling environmental drivers of subarctic dinocyst assemblage compositional change during the Holocene
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. Analysis of compositional changes in fossil organic-walled dinoflagellate cyst (dinocysts) assemblages is a widely used tool for the quantitative reconstruction of past environmental parameters. This approach assumes that the assemblage composition is significantly related to the reconstructed environmental parameter, which requires an independent correlation between the assemblage and the variable, meaning that the variable explains a dimension of the assemblage variance that is not also explained by other parameters. Theoretically, dinocyst assemblages can be used to reconstruct multiple environmental variables. However, there is evidence that primary and subordinate drivers for assemblage compositions regionally differ, and it remains unclear whether a significant relationship to specific parameters in the present ocean always implies that this relationship is significant in fossil assemblages, questioning if past changes in these multiple parameters can be reconstructed simultaneously from fossil assemblages. Here, we analysed a local subset of the Northern Hemisphere dinocyst calibration dataset (n=1968), including samples from the Baffin Bay area (n=421), and evaluated the benefits of a local versus a more regional or global calibration for the environmental reconstruction of Baffin Bay oceanography during the Holocene. We determined the dimensionality of the dinocyst ecological response and identified environmental drivers in the Baffin Bay area for the modern dataset. We analysed four existing Holocene records along a north–south transect in the area and evaluated the statistical significance of downcore reconstructions by applying the local and global datasets with different techniques: the modern analogue technique (MAT), the weighted average partial least square (WA-PLS) and maximum likelihood (ML). We evaluated reconstructions tested as significant in light of the existing state of knowledge about West Greenland's Holocene palaeoceanography. Our analyses imply that present-day and Holocene dinocyst assemblages in the Baffin Bay area are primarily driven by salinity changes; other parameters were less important in driving assemblage compositions, and their contribution differed among the studied records. We show that the objectively occurring and temporally coherent shifts in dinocyst assemblages in the Holocene of Baffin Bay can be robustly interpreted only by transfer functions that are locally calibrated. Transfer functions based on the broad Northern Hemisphere calibration yielded many insignificant environmental reconstructions. At the same time, we show that even in the local calibration, not all parameters that appear to significantly affect dinocyst assemblages in the calibration dataset can be meaningfully reconstructed in the fossil record. A thorough evaluation of the calibration dataset and the significance of downcore applications is necessary to reveal the region-specific information contained in dinocyst assemblage composition.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".