This award supports an integrated field and laboratory paleoenvironmental study of the eastern Canadian Arctic (60 to 90 degrees West, 50 to 85 degrees North), a region known to have experienced significant climatic change during the Holocene. The field team will obtain complete undisturbed sediment records from six strategically located arctic lakes. Fossil pollen and diatom analyses will provide two independent well-dated paleoclimated records for each lake. The new paleoclimatic time series will be combined with published and unpublished data to generate a 100 + site network of plaeoclimate records for the region. This network will be used to map 1) past vegetation change and 2) past climate change over a significant portion of the North American arctic. This investigation will also provide an opportunity to test the utility of annually laminated sediments for arctic paleoclimatology. This effort will provide important new data for inclusion in the eventual mapping and analysis of past environmental change across the entire North Arctic.
