final_program_abstracts[1]

11 IMSC Session Program
What can we learn about palaeo-biomes from pollen?
Tuesday - Parallel Session 3
Jonathan Rougier
Dept. of Mathematics, University of Bristol, UK
Biomisation' is the process of reconstruction biomes from pollen taxa assemblages.
The dominant method is to choose the biome with the highest affinity score. This is a
non-statistical method, and it is interesting to see whether a statistical method can be
derived which uses the same information. Such a method would open the door to
quantitative assessment of biome uncertainty, and a comparison of competing biomes
on the weight of evidence, ie hypothesis testing. We derive such a method, and show
that it is a special case of a more general method that can allow for differential
contamination and counting errors across biomes and pollen taxa, and differential
productivity and dispersal across taxa.
Abstracts 122