| Summary: | A high-resolution characterisation of climatic and environmental change in Taranaki, New Zealand over the last 80,000 years using biotic and abiotic proxies is presented. This research contributes to the small set of sediment cores that extend from the present back through the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) in the southern North Island, and adds to the small number of near-continuous cores in New Zealand. Fossil pollen data presented here provides a record of vegetation changes in response to climate change (temperature, wind and rainfall). In addition, the project applies a recently developed pollen temperature transfer function (Wilmshurst et al. 2007) to quantify, for the first time, temperature change across the entire LGM in this region, and elucidates the timing of Late Quaternary New Zealand climatic events and phases. Climate change timing and magnitude is tested against the climate event stratigraphy (CES) developed by the NZ-INTIMATE (INTegration of Icecore, Marine and Terrestrial archives) group (Alloway et al. 2007), including: Last Glacial Coldest Period (LGCP); the mid-eLGM Interstadial; the Last Glacial-Interglacial Transition (LGIT); Termination I; the Antarctic Cold Reversal (ACR); the Late-Glacial Warm Period (LGWP), the Late-Glacial Reversal (LGR); and Early Holocene Warming (EHW). During the Moerangi Interstadial between 40,000 and 30,000 cal yrs BP, both the Eltham and coastal Taranaki pollen records show that cold-climate taxa such as Nothofagus menziesii, Nothofagus subg. Fuscospora, Hoheria, Plagianthus, Phyllocladus and Poaceae dominated the pollen assemblage. In addition to being cold, low numbers of fern and tree fern spores imply that conditions were drier than present. The LGCP at Eltham (29,000 – 18,000 cal yrs BP) began around 1,200 years earlier than similar records from elsewhere in New Zealand. Transfer functions suggest that mean annual temperatures at the LGCP/ LGM at Eltham were 5.7°C cooler than present. Within the LGCP, the mid-eLGM Interstadial described in similar records ...
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