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Chironomid-environment relations in northern North America

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Abstract

Chironomid assemblages from the uppermost sediments of 435 lakes spanning northern North America were compared to environmental parameters using direct gradient analysis. This large calibration set was merged from several previously developed regional datasets, and increases the number of modern analogues that are available for use for paleoenvironmental interpretations in this region. Air temperature explained the largest amount of variation in the chironomid assemblages with several other environmental factors accounting for statistical significant amounts of the remaining variance. A robust inference model for deriving past mean July air temperatures from subfossil chironomid assemblages was developed and applied to previously published paleoclimate reconstructions from the High-Arctic, Middle-Arctic, Boreal treeline, and Alpine regions of northern North America. The patterns of the temperature reconstructions from the combined dataset were generally similar to the original reconstructions, but with colder inferred temperatures reflecting the incorporation of a larger number of modern sites from colder climates in the combined dataset. This analysis demonstrated that the larger temperature gradient available in the new training set, when compared to the temperature gradients in the original training sets, provides a better estimation of chironomid-environment relationships. In particular, the optima and tolerances estimated using the larger, combined dataset should be more accurate, and therefore, improve midge-based paleoclimate reconstructions for northern North America. Despite the much larger spatial scale and greater associated environmental heterogeneity now incorporated in the combined dataset, this study suggests that in most cases the overarching constraint governing chironomid distributions in northern North America is temperature.

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Acknowledgments

This work was funded by grants from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences and the Canadian Climate Forum (CCF). Contributions from A.S.M. were made possible with support of the W. Garfield Weston Foundation. We are grateful to Gavin Simpson, who added functions to the R analogue package for our analysis, as well as the two anonymous reviewers who improved this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory for Paleoclimatology and Climatology, Ottawa-Carleton Institute of Biology, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, K1N 6N5, Canada

    Marie-Claude Fortin & Konrad Gajewski

  2. Department of Geography, York University, Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3, Canada

    Andrew S. Medeiros

  3. Department of Biological Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6, Canada

    Erin M. Barley

  4. The L.A.K.E.S. Institute, Bielstrasse 53B, 3250, Lyss, Switzerland

    Isabelle Larocque-Tobler

  5. Department of Geography, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, 30602, USA

    David F. Porinchu

  6. Wilson Research Associates Inc, 27 Eastpark Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1B 3Z6, Canada

    Sue E. Wilson

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  1. Marie-Claude Fortin
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  2. Andrew S. Medeiros
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  3. Konrad Gajewski
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  4. Erin M. Barley
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  5. Isabelle Larocque-Tobler
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  6. David F. Porinchu
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  7. Sue E. Wilson
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Correspondence to Andrew S. Medeiros.

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Fortin, MC., Medeiros, A.S., Gajewski, K. et al. Chironomid-environment relations in northern North America. J Paleolimnol 54, 223–237 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10933-015-9848-0

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