Insect fossils are reliable, sensitive indicators of Quaternary environments, and are especially valuable for delineating intervals of rapid climate change. In North America, many studies have focused on the Wisconsin-Holocene transition at ice-proximal sites. The aim of this research is to synthesize and quantify fossil beetle paleoclimate reconstructions for North America, using the Mutual Climate Range (MCR) method. This is a quantitative method of analyzing the insect fossil data by establishing the modern climate range for each species in a fossil assemblage. MCR analyses will be applied to all published ice-proximal late Wisconsin insect records in North America, and will be used to calibrate the existing data to provide temperature isobar maps for major regions. The MCR results will be compared with those established for European faunas and with North American reconstructions based on palynology.
