Environmental Change Research Unit - ECRU

Methods

Our means to reconstruct past environments are firmly based on:

• Knowledge on contemporary ecological and limnological conditions of the systems concerned
• Strict quality control of taxonomic and environmental data
• Statistical techniques

We use an integrated, systems approach, where we collect many lines of evidence from both modern ecology and palaeorecords in order to gain a comprehensive understanding of the processes determining environmental change, ecosystem development, as well as species distributions and biodiversity. From this information, we can generate and test hypotheses, define natural variability, and evaluate models.