This award will support the participation of three U.S. scientists in a workshop intended to lead to the creation of a European repository for late Quarternary pollen data, to be held in Lund, Sweden in August 1989. The workshop is co-organized by Dr. G. L. Jacobson, University of Maine, and Dr. Bjorn E. Berglund, University of Lund, Sweden. Fossil-pollen data provide the principal evidence of variations in vegetation and climate during the past 20,000 years, and serve as the major basis for reconstructing long-term climatic changes and testing in paleoecological studies throughout Europe during the past half century. Unfortunately, the information remains for the most part scattered among many laboratories in many countries. Almost all quantitative approaches to climate reconstruction and model testing require access to the original data from individual sites, and there is urgent need for a single repository for the European data. Specific goals of this workshop are to reach agreements on (1) the location and administration of the databank; (2) who should have overall responsibility for its development and maintenance; (3) how data in the repository can be most conveniently accessible to users; and (4) how contributors can retain appropriate control over what is done with their data. The major result of the workshop will be formal creation of European Data Repository, which will be comparable to the COHMAP database that was established at Brown University for North American data.
