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1. Climate change is expected to increase wildfire activity in boreal ecosystems, thus threatening the carbon stocks of these forests, which are currently the largest terrestrial carbon sink in the world. Describing the ecological processes involved in fire regimes in terms of frequency, size, type (surface vs. crown) and severity (biomass burned) would allow better anticipation of the impact of climate change on these forests. In Fennoscandia, this objective is currently difficult to achieve due to the lack of knowledge of long-term (centuries to millennia) relationships between climate, fire and vegetation.2. We investigated the causes and consequences of changes in fire regimes during the Holocene (last similar to 11,000 years) on vegetation trajectories in the boreal forest of northern Finland. We reconstructed fire histories from sedimentary charcoal at three sites, as well as vegetation dynamics from pollen, moisture changes from Sphagnum spore abundance at two sites, and complemented these analyses with published regional chironomid-inferred July temperature reconstructions.3. Low-frequency, large fires were recorded during the warm and dry mid-Holocene period (8500-4500 cal. year BP), whereas high-frequency, small fires were more characteristic of the cool and wet Neoglacial period (4500 cal. year BP onward). A higher proportion of charcoal particles with a woody aspect-characterizing crown fires-was recorded at one of the two sites at times of significant climatic and vegetational changes, when the abundance of Picea abies was higher.4. Synthesis. Our results show both a direct and an indirect effect of climate on fire regimes in northern Fennoscandia. Warm and dry periods are conducive to large surface fires, whereas cool and moist periods are associated with small fires, either crown or surface. Climate-induced shifts in forest composition also affect fire regimes. Climatic instability can alter vegetation composition and structure and lead to fuel accumulation favouring stand-replacing crown fires. Considering the ongoing climate warming and the projected increase in extreme climatic events, Fennoscandian forests could experience a return to a regime of large surface fires, but stand-replacing crown fires will likely remain a key ecosystem process in areas affected by climatic and/or vegetational instability.

Human activity has fundamentally altered wildfire on Earth, creating serious consequences for human health, global biodiversity, and climate change. However, it remains difficult to predict fire interactions with land use, management, and climate change, representing a serious knowledge gap and vulnerability. We used expert assessment to combine opinions about past and future fire regimes from 98 wildfire researchers. We asked for quantitative and qualitative assessments of the frequency, type, and implications of fire regime change from the beginning of the Holocene through the year 2300. Respondents indicated that direct human activity was already influencing wildfires locally since at least ~12,000 years BP, though natural climate variability remained the dominant driver of fire regime until around 5000 years BP. Responses showed a ten-fold increase in the rate of wildfire regime change during the last 250 years compared with the rest of the Holocene, corresponding first with the intensification and extensification of land use and later with anthropogenic climate change. Looking to the future, fire regimes were predicted to intensify, with increases in fire frequency, severity, and/or size in all biomes except grassland ecosystems. Fire regime showed quite different climate sensitivities across biomes, but the likelihood of fire regime change increased with higher greenhouse gas emission scenarios for all biomes. Biodiversity, carbon storage, and other ecosystem services were predicted to decrease for most biomes under higher emission scenarios. We present recommendations for adaptation and mitigation under emerging fire regimes, concluding that management options are seriously constrained under higher emission scenarios.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. Introduction Methods and materials Results and discussion Timing and type of future fire regime change Consequences of fire regime change Our capacity to prevent, control, or adapt to future fire regimes Charting a course in a world of uncertainty Expert assessment application in fire management

TheWeichselianglaciationis characterized by significant ocean circulation variations starting from ∼115 thousand years ago (ka) and terminating at ∼11.5 ka. The earlyWeichselian(115–74 ka), especiallymarine isotope stage(MIS) 5a at 85–74 ka, provides a window for understanding the linkage between the European westerlies andMediterranean climate. However, lack of highly-resolvedpaleoclimaterecords with absolute chronologies hampers our knowledge of decadal-to-centennial-scale climate changes and forcings in the circum-Mediterranean realm. Here, we present230Th-dated stalagmite-inferred hydroclimate records from Observatoire cave (43°44′ N, 7°25′E), Monaco, for the period between 88.7±0.4 and 80.3±0.1 ka, covering portions of MIS 5b and 5a. Agreement between Observatoire and circum-Mediterraneanstalagmiterecords confirm large-scale warming over the Atlantic-Europe territory during the transition from MIS 5b to 5a. Subdecadally-resolved Observatoire δ18O and δ13C records express four multi-centennial arid intervals in southern Europe at 84–80 ka in the first-half of MIS 5a, suggesting centennial westerly drifts, a finding supported by a model simulation. Westerly changes and associated arid events can be attributed to slowdowns of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation,North Atlantic Oscillationstates, and solar activity.

Low-frequency $1/f^{\gamma}$ noise is ubiquitous, even in high-end electronic devices. For qubits such noise results in decrease of their coherence times. Recently, it was found that adsorbed O$_2$ molecules provide the dominant contribution to flux noise in superconducting quantum interference devices. To clarify the basic principles of such adsorbant noise, we have investigated the formation of low-frequency noise while the mobility of surface adsorbants is varied by temperature. In our experiments, we measured low-frequency current noise in suspended monolayer graphene samples under the influence of adsorbed Ne atoms. Owing to the extremely small intrinsic noise of graphene in suspended Corbino geometry, we could resolve a combination of $1/f^{\gamma}$ and Lorentzian noise spectra induced by the presence of Ne. We find that the $1/f^{\gamma}$ noise is caused by surface diffusion of Ne atoms and by temporary formation of few-Ne-atom clusters. Our results support the idea that clustering dynamics of defects is relevant for understanding of $1/f$ noise in general metallic systems., Comment: Manuscript and SI

A comprehensive database of paleoclimate records is needed to place recent warming into the longer-term context of natural climate variability. We present a global compilation of quality-controlled, published, temperature-sensitive proxy records extending back 12,000 years through the Holocene. Data were compiled from 679 sites where time series cover at least 4000 years, are resolved at sub-millennial scale (median spacing of 400 years or finer) and have at least one age control point every 3000 years, with cut-off values slackened in data-sparse regions. The data derive from lake sediment (51%), marine sediment (31%), peat (11%), glacier ice (3%), and other natural archives. The database contains 1319 records, including 157 from the Southern Hemisphere. The multi-proxy database comprises paleotemperature time series based on ecological assemblages, as well as biophysical and geochemical indicators that reflect mean annual or seasonal temperatures, as encoded in the database. This database can be used to reconstruct the spatiotemporal evolution of Holocene temperature at global to regional scales, and is publicly available in Linked Paleo Data (LiPD) format. Fil: Kaufman, Darrell. Northern Arizona University.; Estados Unidos Fil: McKay, Nicholas. Northern Arizona University.; Estados Unidos Fil: Routson, Cody. Northern Arizona University.; Estados Unidos Fil: Erb, Michael. Northern Arizona University.; Estados Unidos Fil: Davis, Basil. University Of Lausanne; Suiza Fil: Heiri, Oliver. University Of Basel; Suiza Fil: Jaccard, Samuel. University Of Bern; Suiza Fil: Tierney, Jessica. University of Arizona; Estados Unidos Fil: Dätwyler, Christoph. University Of Bern; Suiza Fil: Axford, Yarrow. Northwestern University; Estados Unidos Fil: Brussel, Thomas. University of Utah; Estados Unidos Fil: Cartapanis, Olivier. University Of Bern; Suiza Fil: Chase, Brian. Universite de Montpellier; Francia Fil: Dawson, Andria. Mount Royal University; Canadá Fil: de Vernal, Anne. Université du Québec a Montreal; Canadá Fil: Engels, Stefan. University of London; Reino Unido Fil: Jonkers, Lukas. University Of Bremen; Alemania Fil: Marsicek, Jeremiah. University of Wisconsin-Madison; Estados Unidos Fil: Moffa Sánchez, Paola. University of Durham; Reino Unido Fil: Morrill, Carrie. University of Colorado; Estados Unidos Fil: Orsi, Anais. Université Paris-Saclay; Francia Fil: Rehfeld, Kira. Heidelberg University; Alemania Fil: Saunders, Krystyna. Australian Nuclear Science And Technology Organisation; Australia Fil: Sommer, Philipp. University Of Lausanne; Suiza Fil: Thomas, Elizabeth. University At Buffalo; Estados Unidos Fil: Tonello, Marcela Sandra. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mar del Plata. Instituto de Investigaciones Marinas y Costeras. Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Investigaciones Marinas y Costeras; Argentina Fil: Tóth, Mónika. Balaton Limnological Institute; Hungría Fil: Vachula, Richard. Brown University; Estados Unidos Fil: Andreev, Andrei. Alfred Wegener Institut Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research; Alemania Fil: Bertrand, Sebastien. Ghent University; Bélgica Fil: Massaferro, Julieta. Administración de Parques Nacionales. Parque Nacional "Nahuel Huapi"; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina

The collection of modern spatially extensive pollen data are important for the interpretation of fossil pollen diagrams. Such datasets are readily available for percentage data but lacking for pollen accumulation rates (PAR). Filling this gap has been the motivation of the pollen monitoring network, whose contributors monitored pollen deposition in modified Tauber-traps for several years or decades across European latitudes. Here we present this monitoring dataset consisting of 351 trap locations with a total of 2742 annual samples covering the period from 1981 to 2017. This dataset shows that climate parameters correlating with latitude determine pollen productivity. A signal of regional forest cover can be detected in the data, while local tree cover seems more important. Pollen traps situated beyond 200 km of the distribution of the parent tree are still collecting occasional pollen grains of the tree in question. PAR’s of up to 30 grains cm−2yr−1 in fossil diagram should therefore be interpreted as long distance transport. Comparisons to fossil data from the same areas show comparable values. Comparisons often demonstrate that similar high values for temperate taxa in fossils sites are found further south or downhill. While modern situations comparable to high PAR values of some taxa (e.g. Corylus) may be hard to find, CO2 fertilization and land use may case high modern PAR’s that are not documented in the fossil record. The modern data is now publically available in the Neotoma Paleoecology Database and hopefully serves improving interpretations of fossil PAR data.

Sediments from lakes are a useful climate archive that provides information about past climate changes and human impact. It is well-known that abrupt climate change can be the trigger of the collapse or migrations of past civilizations. To have a better understanding of the migration of the Yamnaya civilization, located west of the Black Sea at ~5.5-5 cal kyr BP, we hypothesize that past climate changes acts as a driver of this migration. To test this we focus on a sedimentary record retrieved from the Mocearu lake that is located at 780 m a.s.l. in the Buzau mountains (eastern Carpathians, Romania). The record has a length of 7 m and covers the last ~6.5 cal kyr BP based on AMS radiocarbon dates. To reconstruct vegetation, environment and climate during the Middle and Late Holocene, we use complementary techniques: pollen, inorganic (XRF-analysis) and organic geochemistry based on lipid biomarkers (brGDGTs). The reconstruction has been carried out with higher resolution during the Middle Holocene, with the objective of finding evidence of the climatic changes that may have occurred around 5 cal kyr BP. Based on preliminary radiocarbon dating, the climatic reconstruction (based on brGDGTs) shows an increase in temperature from ~6 to 5.5 cal kyr BP, followed by a prominent decrease ~5.3-5 cal kyr BP., EGUsphere

Heterogeneous Holocene climate evolutions in the Northern Hemisphere high latitudes are primarily determined by orbital-scale insolation variations and melting ice sheets. Previous inter-model comparisons have revealed that multi-simulation consistencies vary spatially. We, therefore, compared multiple model results with proxy-based reconstructions in Fennoscandia, Greenland, north Canada, Alaska and Siberia. Our model-data comparisons reveal that data and models generally agree in Fennoscandia, Greenland and Canada, with the early-Holocene warming and subsequent gradual decrease to 0 ka BP (hereinafter referred as ka). In Fennoscandia, simulations and pollen data suggest a 2 °C warming by 8 ka, but this is less expressed in chironomid data. In Canada, a strong early-Holocene warming is suggested by both the simulations and pollen results. In Greenland, the magnitude of early-Holocene warming ranges from 6 °C in simulations to 8 °C in δ18O-based temperatures. Simulated and reconstructed temperatures are mismatched in Alaska. Pollen data suggest strong early-Holocene warming, while the simulations indicate constant Holocene cooling, and chironomid data show a stable trend. Meanwhile, a high frequency of Alaskan peatland initiation before 9 ka can reflect a either high temperature, high soil moisture or large seasonality. In high-latitude Siberia, although simulations and proxy data depict high Holocene temperatures, these signals are noisy owing to a large spread in the simulations and between pollen and chironomid results. On the whole, the Holocene climate evolutions in most regions (Fennoscandia, Greenland and Canada) are well established and understood, but important questions regarding the Holocene temperature trend and mechanisms remain for Alaska and Siberia.

Fossil pollen records are well-established indicators of past vegetation changes. The prevalence of pollen across environmental settings including lakes, wetlands, and marine sediments, has made palynology one of the most ubiquitous and valuable tools for studying past environmental and climatic change globally for decades. A complementary research focus has been the development of statistical techniques to derive quantitative estimates of climatic conditions from pollen assemblages. This paper reviews the most commonly used statistical techniques and their rationale and seeks to provide a resource to facilitate their inclusion in more palaeoclimatic research. To this end, we first address the fundamental aspects of fossil pollen data that should be considered when undertaking pollen-based climate reconstructions. We then introduce the range of techniques currently available, the history of their development, and the situations in which they can be best employed. We reviewthe literature on how to define robust calibration datasets, produce high-quality reconstructions, and evaluate climate reconstructions, and suggest methods and products that could be developed to facilitate accessibility and global usability. To continue to foster the development and inclusion of pollen climate reconstruction methods, we promote the development of reporting standards. When established, such standards should 1) enable broader application of climate reconstruction techniques, especially in regions where such methods are currently underused, and 2) enable the evaluation and reproduction of individual reconstructions, structuring them for the evolving open-science era, and optimising the use of fossil pollen data as a vital means for the study of past environmental and climatic variability. We also strongly encourage developers and users of palaeoclimate reconstruction methodologies to make associated programming code publicly available, which will further help disseminate these techniques to interested communities.

The hydroclimate over Asia has undergone important changes over the Holocene with spatially asynchronous trends. Proxy-based evidence shows that North Asia was markedly drier than today during the early Holocene, whereas East Asia, influenced by the monsoon system, was substantially wetter. Yet, the causes behind this contrast are only partly understood due to a lack of overview of the most important factors. Here we explore a combination of climate proxies and multiple climate-model simulations to show that the strong contrast between the dry North Asia and wet (mid-latitude) East Asia is explained by a complex interplay between the effects of remnant ice sheets and orbital forcing. In North Asia, the climate was dry due a weakening of the westerlies and reduced atmospheric humidity, linked to the ice sheets in North America and Fennoscandia. In East Asia, contrarily, the orbitally-forced enhancement of the summer monsoons caused the early Holocene climate to be much wetter than during the presentday. These results indicate that the sensitivity of the hydroclimate in Asia to climate-forcings is spatially different, with important implications for the interpretation of past and future climate changes in this region. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The Eurasian (née European) Modern Pollen Database (EMPD) was established in 2013 to provide a public database of high-quality modern pollen surface samples to help support studies of past climate, land cover, and land use using fossil pollen. The EMPD is part of, and complementary to, the European Pollen Database (EPD) which contains data on fossil pollen found in Late Quaternary sedimentary archives throughout the Eurasian region. The EPD is in turn part of the rapidly growing Neotoma database, which is now the primary home for global palaeoecological data. This paper describes version 2 of the EMPD in which the number of samples held in the database has been increased by 60% from 4826 to 8134. Much of the improvement in data coverage has come from northern Asia, and the database has consequently been renamed the Eurasian Modern Pollen Database to reflect this geographical enlargement. The EMPD can be viewed online using a dedicated map-based viewer at https://empd2.github.io and downloaded in a variety of file formats at https: //doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.909130 (Chevalier et al., 2019)., Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) 200021_169598, University of Lausanne

Fire is a major disturbance agent in the boreal forest, influencing many current and future ecosystem conditions and services. Surprisingly few studies have attempted to improve the accuracy of fire-event reconstructions even though the estimates of the occurrence of past fires may be biased, influencing the reliability of the models employing those data (e.g. C stock, cycle). This study aimed to demonstrate how three types of fire proxies – fire scars from tree rings, sedimentary charcoal and, for the first time in this context, fungal spores of Neurospora – can be integrated to achieve a better understanding of past fire dynamics. By studying charcoal and Neurospora from sediment cores from forest hollows, and the fire scars from tree rings in their surroundings in the southern Fennoscandian and western Russian boreal forest, we produced composite fire-event data sets and fire-event frequencies, and estimated fire return intervals. Our estimates show that the fire return interval varied between 126 and 237 years during the last 11,000 years. The highest fire frequency during the 18th–19th century can be associated with the anthropogenic influence. Importantly, statistical tests revealed a positive relationship between other fire event indicators and Neurospora occurrence allowing us to pinpoint past fire events at times when the sedimentary charcoal was absent, but Neurospora were abundant. We demonstrated how fire proxies with different temporal resolution can be linked, providing potential improvements in the reliability of fire history reconstructions from multiple proxies.

The study, based on the examination of 70 published and unpublished pollen profiles from Poland and supplementary data from the surrounding regions, shows that an abrupt, episodic Alnus population decline at the end of the first millennium CE was a much more widespread event than has been previously reported, spanning large areas of the temperate and boreal zones in Europe. The data from Poland suggest that the decline was roughly synchronous and most likely occurred between the 9th and 10th centuries, with strong indications for the 10th century. The pollen data indicate that human impacts were not a major factor in the event. Instead, we hypothesize that one or a series of abrupt climatic shifts that caused floods and droughts at the end of the first millennium CE could have initiated this ecological disturbance, leading to a higher vulnerability of the alder trees to a pathogen outbreak. Following current observations of the decline of alder stands in Europe due to a Phytophthora outbreak, we suggest that a similar process may have occurred in the past. This study provides insight into long-term alder (mainly Alnus glutinosa) dynamics in a condition of climate change and illustrates its great resilience, enabling the natural, successful regeneration of alder stands after critical diebacks if environmental conditions improve. Our finding that the Alnus pollen decline reflects a roughly synchronous event indicates that the decline could be used as an over-regional chronostratigraphic marker for 800–1000 CE in pollen diagrams from a large part of the European Lowland.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

To analyze the global hydroclimate response during the Younger Dryas cold event, we evaluate climate model results that have been constrained with proxy-based temperatures from the North Atlantic region. We find that both the temperature and the hydroclimate response have a clear global signature. A marked cooling is simulated over the North Atlantic Ocean (more than 5 °C) and the downwind continents (2–4 °C). This response is related to the weakening of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation under influence of meltwater discharges. The hydroclimate response is most expressed over Eurasia in a belt between 40 and 60°N, and over Northern Africa in the Sahel region. In both areas, a strong decrease in soil moisture is simulated (up to 20% reduction). In contrast, a striking increase in moisture is found over southeastern North America (15% increase), where southerly atmospheric flow brings moist air to the continent. Outside these areas that are clearly affected by the cold North Atlantic Ocean, the responses of temperature and moisture are decoupled, with different causes for these temperature and hydroclimate responses. In the tropics, the hydroclimate response is governed by the southward shift of the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) due to the cooling of the North Atlantic Ocean. This causes drier conditions north of the equator and wetter conditions in the Southern Hemisphere tropics. The associated changes in soil moisture are relatively gradual here, taking up to two centuries to complete, suggesting that the impact of the ITCZ shift on the tropical hydroclimate is building up. Our experiment indicates that Southern Hemisphere continents experienced a small cooling (less than 0.5 °C) during the Younger Dryas, caused by the negative radiative forcing associated with reduced atmospheric methane concentrations and enhanced dust levels. In our simulation, the bi-polar seesaw mechanism is relatively weak, so that the associated warming of the South Atlantic Ocean is not overwhelming the reduction in radiative forcing. Our results thus indicate that in the tropics and/or Southern Hemisphere, the cooling is a response to the negative radiative forcing, while the hydroclimatic changes are predominantly resulting from ITCZ variations. Consequently, when interpreting hydroclimatic proxy records from these regions, data should not be compared directly to key records from high latitudes, such as Greenland ice core stable isotope records. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd

To investigate the mechanisms behind Holocene regional climate trends from north of 58°N in the North Atlantic-Fennoscandian region Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was performed and a temperature anomaly stack produced from 81 proxy derived summer temperature time series from 74 sites. The PC results show distinctly different trends for near-surface versus surface temperatures, demonstrating the importance of handling these separately. The first PC of weighted sea surface summer temperature time series and continental time series explains 45 ± 8% of the variance, where the uncertainty is the standard deviation of the distribution of variance explained across the 1000 age-uncertain ensemble members. PC1 has a relatively uniform expression over the whole region, closely following the summer insolation at 65°N. The second PC explains 22 ± 4% of the variance and shows a non-uniform expression, with loadings in opposite directions in the northern and southeastern parts of the region. Comparing the PC time series with model runs and with the timing of the demise of the Laurentide Ice Sheet (LIS), suggest that this pattern reflects both topographic and albedo effects of the LIS as well as release of meltwater into the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. Comparing the stack of gridded records with published global stacks reveals an unusual Holocene temperature development in the North Atlantic-Fennoscandian region most likely resulting from the location relative to the decaying LIS.

In eastern Fennoscandia numerous biological and physical proxy records provide ample evidence of Holocene climate-environment dynamics. The region therefore has great promise for studies concentrating on the impacts of past climate change on human populations in the early Holocene, that is, in the period that saw the beginning of postglacial human dispersal into the area. Here we provide a brief overview of the high and low frequency climate changes indicated by different proxy records in Finland and nearby areas in eastern Fennoscandia, and discuss the archaeological evidence for human responses to abrupt climate-related environmental change and low-frequency climate trends. The clearest archaeologically visible event-like responses seem to derive from ecotonal regions, i.e., the forest–tundra or coastal regions and suggest a correlation between ecological “hinge-regions” and the archaeologically clearest signs of hunter-gatherer responses to climate stress. However, the evidence of the abrupt climate events is often ambiguous and their influence on early Holocene human populations remains equivocal.

A novel principle of low-noise voltage measurement based on microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) is introduced and experimentally demonstrated. The method is based on parametric conversion of voltage via electromechanical force to the amplitude of the RF signal of the capacitive measurement circuit that detects the displacement of a moving-plate MEMS capacitor. Both theory and experiments show that the noise of voltage measurement can be considerably decreased by biasing the MEMS device near its pull-in point. Experimental results are in agreement with theoretical predictions and they indicate the potential of the method as a competitor of state-of-the-art low-noise voltmeters in special applications.

We have investigated a THz detection scheme based on mixing of electrical signals in a voltage-dependent capacitance made out of suspended graphene. We have analyzed both coherent and incoherent detection regimes and compared their performance with the state of the art. Using a high-amplitude local oscillator, we anticipate potential for quantum limited detection in the coherent mode. The sensitivity stems from the extraordinary mechanical and electrical properties of atomically thin graphene or graphene-related 2D materials., Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure

Sedimentary pollen offers excellent opportunities to reconstruct vegetation changes over past millennia. Number of different pollen taxa or pollen richness is used to characterise past plant richness. To improve the interpretation of sedimentary pollen richness, it is essential to understand the relationship between pollen and plant richness in contemporary landscapes. This study presents a regional-scale comparison of pollen and plant richness from northern Europe and evaluates the importance of environmental variables on pollen and plant richness. We use a pollen dataset of 511 lake-surface pollen samples ranging through temperate, boreal and tundra biomes. To characterise plant diversity, we use a dataset formulated from the two largest plant atlases available in Europe. We compare pollen and plant richness estimates in different groups of taxa (wind-pollinated vs. non-wind-pollinated, trees and shrubs vs. herbs and grasses) and test their relationships with climate and landscape variables. Pollen richness is significantly positively correlated with plant richness (r = 0.53). The pollen plant richness correlation improves (r = 0.63) when high pollen producers are downweighted prior to estimating richness minimising the influence of pollen production on the pollen richness estimate. This suggests that methods accommodating pollen-production differences in richness estimates deserve further attention and should become more widely used in Quaternary pollen diversity studies. The highest correlations are found between pollen and plant richness of trees and shrubs (r = 0.83) and of wind-pollinated taxa (r = 0.75) suggesting that these are the best measures of broad-scale plant richness over several thousands of square kilometres. Mean annual temperature is the strongest predictor of both pollen and plant richness. Landscape openness is positively associated with pollen richness but not with plant richness. Pollen richness values from extremely open and/or cold areas where pollen production is low should be interpreted with caution because low local pollen production increases the proportion of extra-regional pollen. Synthesis. Our results confirm that pollen data can provide insights into past plant richness changes in northern Europe, and with careful consideration of pollen-production differences and spatial scale represented, pollen data make it possible to investigate vegetation diversity trends over long time-scales and under changing climatic and habitat conditions.

We test and analyse a new calibration method, boosted regression trees (BRTs) in palaeoclimatic reconstructions based on fossil pollen assemblages. We apply BRTs to multiple Holocene and Lateglacial pollen sequences from northern Europe, and compare their performance with two commonly-used calibration methods: weighted averaging regression (WA) and the modern-analogue technique (MAT). Using these calibration methods and fossil pollen data, we present synthetic reconstructions of Holocene summer temperature, winter temperature, and water balance changes in northern Europe. Highly consistent trends are found for summer temperature, with a distinct Holocene thermal maximum at ca 8000–4000 cal. a BP, with a mean T jja anomaly of ca +0.7 °C at 6 ka compared to 0.5 ka. We were unable to reconstruct reliably winter temperature or water balance, due to the confounding effects of summer temperature and the great between-reconstruction variability. We find BRTs to be a promising tool for quantitative reconstructions from palaeoenvironmental proxy data. BRTs show good performance in cross-validations compared with WA and MAT, can model a variety of taxon response types, find relevant predictors and incorporate interactions between predictors, and show some robustness with non-analogue fossil assemblages.

This paper presents the development of passive high frequency (HF) and ultrahigh frequency (UHF) radio frequency identification (RFID) sensor transponders for humidity and temperature monitoring. The transponders use RFID integrated circuits with a digital interface for communicating with a ultralow-power microprocessor. The microprocessor handles the measurement, either by charging sensor and reference capacitors, or by commanding a digital sensor. The read ranges of the sensor nodes are 5 cm and up to 40 cm at HF and UHF, respectively. The sensor nodes are demonstrated in concrete casts, where the HF node provides better than 5%RH-repeatability of the moisture measurements from sensor node to another. At UHF the repeatability is about 15%RH.

Intermodulation communication principle has been recently developed to wirelessly read-out passive sensors. Intermodulation communication sensors reply the sensor information at an intermodulation frequency when interrogated by a reader device with two tones. This paper derives an analytical expression for optimizing the electrical circuitry of such a sensor. The derived equations are verified by harmonic balance simulations. An optimized sensor is designed and fabricated and experimentally characterized. Results show that 1% change in the sensor capacitance can still be detected at a 13 m-distance and the read-out principle could enable an extreme resolution at shorter distances (less than per mille below 5 m). A wireless electrocardiography measurement is demonstrated.

Contactless rapid electrical sintering (RES) is demonstrated using microwave power. The method is implemented by coupling the near-field electric field of a sintering head across an underlying nanoparticle layer. We provide appropriate biasing conditions required for controlled power delivery and demonstrate real-time monitoring of the process by measuring the reflected power at 1.8 GHz. A small-scale sintering head is designed and fabricated on a printed circuit board (PCB). The PCB head is shown to provide a tenfold improvement in sintering efficiency when compared to a sintering head with a less focused electric field pattern. Finally, a high-power coaxial sintering head, with a narrow electrode spacing and biasing conditions similar to the PCB head, is used for demonstrating contactless RES over an air gap. Silver nanoparticle patterning inkjet printed on a temperature-sensitive flexible substrate is efficiently sintered in two passes with 50-W input power and 25-mm/s processing speed, when the vertical working distance to the constantly moving substrate is 1 mm. The demonstrated sintering technology can be applied to a number of printed electronics applications.

Radio frequency identification (RFID) antennas for HF and UHF frequencies are ink-jet printed using commercially available silver nanoparticle ink. Quality factors of 5.3 and 9.4 are obtained for coil antennas targeted for 13.56 MHz when the printing and sintering process is repeated two and three times, respectively. The measured maximum effective aperture of the printed UHF antenna is only some decibels lower than that of an equivalent etched copper antenna and the maximum reading distance with 0.5 W (ERP) transmitted power is 3 m for continuous reading. These results suggest that obtaining a low enough series resistance for printed coils is challenging while printed RFID antennas for UHF do not set as strict requirements on conductivity. With a perfectly optimized structure, a UHF tag antenna printed in just one layer of ink can be practically equal in performance with the traditional etched copper and aluminum tags.

Every material which dissipates electrical energy generates thermal noise power that is related to the temperature of that material. This work exploits this effect to measure the average absolute temperature within a vessel. We present a technique for the measurement of core temperature based on inductive noise telemetry; where a loop antenna is magnetically coupled to a saline solution. Dissipations in the antenna are dominated by the solution and therefore the noise measured in the antenna is dominated by the noise in the solution. This work demonstrates a noise measurement of 0.67 pV/°C/VHz, approaching the theoretical calculated noise in the solution. The noise thermometry system is demonstrated, in ideal conditions and a temperature measurement resolution of 0.2°C is achieved.

The relative importance of climate, forest fires and human population size on long-term boreal forest composition were statistically investigated at regional and local scales in Fennoscandia. We employ pollen data from lakes, reflecting regional vegetation, and small forest hollows, reflecting local vegetation, from Russia, Finland and Sweden to reconstruct the long-term forest composition. As potential drivers of the Holocene forest dynamics we consider climate, generated from a climate model and oxygen isotope data, past forest fires generated from sedimentary charcoal data and human population size derived from radiocarbon dated archaeological findings. We apply the statistical method of variation partitioning to assess the relative importance of these environmental variables on long-term boreal forest composition. The results show that climate is the main driver of the changes in Holocene boreal forest composition at the regional scale. However, at the local scale the role of climate is relatively small. In general, the importance of forest fires is low both at regional and local scales. The fact that both climate and forest fires explain relatively small proportions of variation in long-term boreal vegetation in small forest hollow records demonstrates the complexity of factors affecting stand-scale forest dynamics. The relative importance of human population size was low in both the prehistorical and the historical time periods. However, this is the first time that this type of data has been used to statistically assess the importance of human population size on boreal vegetation and the spatial representativeness of the data may cause bias to the analysis.

We have designed and fabricated micromechanical magnetometers intended for a 3D electronic compass which could be embedded in portable devices. The sensors are based on the Lorentz force acting on a current-carrying coil, processed on a single crystal silicon resonator. Sensors for all cartesian components of the magnetic field vector can be processed on the same chip. The vibration amplitude is detected capacitively and the resonance is tracked by a phase-locked-loop circuit. The fabrication process is based on aligned direct bonding of a double side polished and a SOI wafer. Magnetometers measuring the field component along the chip surface have a flux density resolution of about 10 nT/√Hz at a coil current of 100 μA. Magnetometers measuring the field component perpendicular to the chip surface are currently less sensitive with flux density resolution of about 70 nT/√Hz. Resolution is limited by the fundamental thermomechanical noise. The standard deviation of the signal was less than 1% over a period of 5 days.

Holocene (the last 12,000 years) temperature variation, including the transition out of the last Ice Age to a warmer climate, is reconstructed at multiple locations in southern Finland, Sweden and Estonia based on pollen fossil data from lake sediment cores. A novel Bayesian statistical approach is proposed that allows the reconstructed temperature histories to interact through shared environmental response parameters and spatial dependence. The prior distribution for past temperatures is partially based on numerical climate simulation. The features in the reconstructions are consistent with the quantitative climate reconstructions based on more commonly used reconstruction techniques. The results suggest that the novel spatio-temporal approach can provide quantitative reconstructions that are smoother, less uncertain and generally more realistic than the site-specific individual reconstructions., Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/15-AOAS832 in the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)

Investigations of climate–growth interactions can shed light on the response of forest growth to climate change and the dendroclimatic reconstructions. However, most existing studies in the climatically important Tibetan Plateau (TP) and surrouding regions focus on linear growth responses to environmental variation. Herein we investigated both the linear and the nonlinear climate–growth interactions for 152 tree-ring chronologies in the TP and vicinity. We introduced the boosted regression tree (BRT) technique to study the nonlinear climate–growth relationships by pooling several sites with similar climate–growth relationships to mitigate potential biases due to the shortness of the instrumental records. Across most of the TP and surroundings, tree growth is stressed by drought. The warming induced drought has been evidenced by the strong interactions between temperature and precipitation in the BRT analyses. The drought stress on forest growth is particularly conspicuous for a hydrological year over much of the Northern TP and surroundings. The BRT analyses indicate the compensation effect of moisture prior to the growing season for the moisture deficit in the early growing season in May to July, when most of the ring-width formation occurs. ISSN:1748-9326 ISSN:1748-9318

A slow-wave microelectromechanical delay line, composed of a chain of coupled resonators, is introduced. The delay line has a bandpass response and, depending on structural details, signal group velocity can be as low as ~10 m s−1, that is over 100 times smaller than for acoustical SAW or BAW delay lines. Properties of the delay line are analyzed theoretically and the theory is verified in measurements.

Stability of wafer level vacuum encapsulated micromechanical resonators is characterized. The resonators are etched of silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafers using deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) and encapsulated with anodic bonding. Bulk acoustic wave (BAW) resonator show drift better than 0.1 ppm/month demonstrating that the stability requirements for a reference oscillator can be met with MEMS. The drift of flexural resonators range from 4 ppm/month to over 500 ppm/month depending on resonator anchoring. The large drift exhibited by some flexural resonator types is attributed to packaging related stresses demonstrated by the sample temperature–frequency coefficients differing from the bulk silicon value.

We have developed a simple room-temperature readout for superconducting bolometers and calorimeters. Due to electro-thermal feedback, the bolometer can be noise-matched with the readout amplifier. The constructed amplifier consists of low-noise field-effect transistors, and voltage bias is actively provided by electrical feedback. According to our measurements on superconducting vacuum-bridge bolometers, the total noise is limited by the bolometer phonon and Johnson noise characterized by a critical temperature of 8.5 K. We show that, with proper sensor design, it is possible to reach the photon noise limit in video-rate submillimetre imaging applications.

We have designed and manufactured a micromachined moving plate capacitor to be used as an AC voltage reference in electrical metrology. The reference is based on the characteristic AC current–voltage curve of the component having a maximum, the value of which ideally depends only on the geometry of the component and material properties of single crystalline silicon. The electrode surface stability is essential in this application and hence a new fabrication process has been developed to metallize both surfaces of an electrostatically actuated micromachined structure. The stability of the AC reference voltage at a frequency of 100 kHz and an RMS voltage value 6.4 V was measured to be ±60 ppm over 14 h.

We present experimental results on new programmable Josephson voltage standards based on frequency dependently damped superconductor-insulator-superconductor (SIS) junctions. We introduce a design able to generate two independent floating voltages up to 1.5 V using a microwave frequency of 70 GHz. The array is developed for dc and ac voltage and impedance metrology. The design is optimized in terms of speed, power consumption, and stability. Stimulated power generation is shown to affect the performance of long SIS arrays. The collective dynamics of Josephson junctions is analyzed and a boundary condition for the design of long arrays is derived.

A micromechanical moving plate capacitor has been designed and fabricated for use as a dc voltage reference. The reference is based on the characteristic pull-in property of a capacitive microelectromechanical system (MEMS) component. The design is optimized for stability. A new silicon-on-insulator (SOI) process has been developed to manufacture the component. We also report on improved feedback electronics and the latest measurement results.

Nonlinear effects in single-crystal silicon microresonators are analyzed with the focus on mechanical nonlinearities. The bulk acoustic wave (BAW) resonators are shown to have orders-of-magnitude higher energy storage capability than flexural beam resonators. The bifurcation point for the silicon BAW resonators is measured and the maximum vibration amplitude is shown to approach the intrinsic material limit. The importance of nonlinearities in setting the limit for vibration energy storage is demonstrated in oscillator applications. The phase noise calculated for silicon microresonator-based oscillators is compared to the conventional macroscopic quartz-based oscillators, and it is shown that the higher energy density attainable with the silicon resonators can partially compensate for the small microresonator size. Scaling law for microresonator phase noise is developed.

In this paper, an adequate account of the theory and practice of SQUIDs and of magnetoencephalography (MEG) and magnetocardiography (MCG) is given. MEG and MCG are two completely non-invasive imaging techniques, suitable for basic and clinical studies of human subjects. Large SQUID arrays, operating at liquid helium temperatures, are employed for detecting and localizing the magnetically active regions, modelled by current dipoles, in the working brain or heart. The measurements are usually performed in magnetically shielded rooms. Time resolution of both methods is better than 1 ms and spatial uncertainty 5. . . 6 mm. The evoked brain signals are as small as 40 fT, one billionth of the earths geomagnetic field. The dc SQUID is discussed with a detailed description of the ideas behind and construction of the modern VTT superconducting sensor. A shorted account is given on the PTB SQUID. Commercial multi-SQUID instruments, briefly described, are now available from three manufacturers. Seven examples of brain studies, including two clinical applications, are discussed. Cardiomagnetic instrumentation is described and the use of MCG in detecting heart abnormalities is presented with three examples. The advantages and drawbacks of modern imaging techniques, including MEG, MCG, MRI, fMRI, and PET, are compared and the future of MEG and MCG is discussed. Eventually, when it becomes feasible to use high-Tc SQUIDs in MEG and MCG, the high cost of magnetic measurements can be reduced.

We used the band structure of a mesoscopic Josephson junction to construct low-noise amplifiers. By taking advantage of the quantum dynamics of a Josephson junction, i.e., the interplay of interlevel transitions and the Coulomb blockade of Cooper pairs, we created transistor-like devices, Bloch oscillating transistors, with considerable current gain and high-input impedance. In these transistors, the correlated supercurrent of Cooper pairs is controlled by a small base current made up of single electrons. Our devices reached current and power gains on the order of 30 and 5, respectively. The noise temperature was estimated to be around 1 kelvin, but noise temperatures of less than 0.1 kelvin can be realistically achieved. These devices provide quantum-electronic building blocks that will be useful at low temperatures in low-noise circuit applications with an intermediate impedance level.