• Paleobotanists have long used models based on leaf size and shape to reconstruct paleoclimate. However, most models incorporate a single variable or use traits that are not physiologically or functionally linked to climate, limiting their predictive power. Further, they often underestimate paleotemperature relative to other proxies. • Here we quantify leaf-climate correlations from 92 globall...

Paleoclimate, changes of climate over Earth's history, provide valuable insights about the effects of human perturbations to climate, even though there is no close paleoclimate analog of the strong, rapid forcing that humans are applying to the climate system. International discussions of human-made climate change (e.g., IPCC) rely heavily on global climate models, with less emphasis on inferen...

Projected changes in global rainfall patterns will likely alter water supplies and ecosystems in semiarid regions during the coming century. Instrumental and paleoclimate data indicate that natural hydroclimate fluctuations tend to be more energetic at low (multidecadal to multicentury) than at high (interannual) frequencies. State-of-the-art global climate models do not capture this characteri...

The development of paleoclimate streamflow reconstructions in the conterminous United States (CONUS) has provided water resource managers with improved insights into multi-decadal and centennial scale variability that cannot be reliably detected using shorter instrumental records. Paleoclimate streamflow reconstructions have largely focused on individual catchments limiting the ability to quant...

Many ecosystem processes that influence Earth system feedbacks – vegetation growth, water and nutrient cycling, disturbance regimes – are strongly influenced by multidecadalto millennial-scale climate variations that cannot be directly observed. Paleoclimate records provide information about these variations, forming the basis of our understanding and modeling of them. Fossil pollen records are...

Great strides have been made in the field of reconstructing past temperatures based on models relating temperature to temperature-sensitive paleoclimate proxies. One of the goals of such reconstructions is to assess if current climate is anomalous in a millennial context. These regression based approaches model the conditional mean of the temperature distribution as a function of paleoclimate p...