Data description for the DANS project: Disclosure of paleoecological datasets of IBED, FNWI, UvA

The Paleoecology group of IBED has collected sediment cores in lakes and analyzed the samples for pollen during many decades, but the resulting data have not been digitized in a systematic way. Therefore a project was funded by DANS with the aim to archive data and at making them public domain. The focus of this project is on the large amounts of pollen data from South America, mainly Colombia. Metadata were collected from the publications, where necessary taxon names were adapted to modern nomenclature, all age models were fitted using the same methodology and data were entered in spreadsheets, together with the raw pollen counts. From these spreadsheets ASCII files were created (CSV-format) and archived on the DANS server (EASY, https://easy.dans.knaw.nl/). The data from 62 sediment cores were uploaded: 3 cores from Bolivia, 53 from Colombia, 1 from Ecuador, 1 from Guatemala, 1 from Mexico, and 3 from Peru. All these data are now in EASY and can be downloaded from there.