Paleoenvironmental reconstruction of the holocene beerberg peatland sequence (Thuringia, Germany) - The added value of inversed modeling of biomarker composition

Paleoenvironmental reconstruction has been frequently applied to various terrestrial archives, including peat sequences to better understand local and regional climate and environmental changes. Numerous tools have been applied with biomarkers as one of the most powerful tools in this respect. However, commonly single biomarkers of a set of individual compounds were applied, which often results in some contradictory results in between different substance classes. On the Beerbergmoor sequence from Thuringia, Germany, that covers the last ca. 6000 years before present, we applied various biomarkers such as alkanes, fatty acids and alcohols to trace changes in the vegetation composition. In addition, we applied for the first time an inversed model to assess quantitative shifts in vegetation composition among all investigated biomarker classes. The overall aim was to determine, whether inversed modeling can provide more comprehensive and quantitative changes of plant communities in such paleoenvironmental records.