WIEMANN, MICHAEL C.1*, ELISABETH A. WHEELER2, STEVEN R. MANCHESTER3, and DAVID L. DILCHER3. 1USDA Forest Products Laboratory, Madison, WI 53705; 2Dept. of Wood and Paper Science, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695; 3Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611. - Modern and Eocene temperature estimation from leaf morphology and wood anatomy.
Canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) and regression models,
developed to predict mean annual temperature (MAT) using leaf
morphology and wood anatomy, were tested using leaves and wood
collected from sites in the eastern United States, and were used to
calculate paleotemperature of the Eocene Clarno Nut Beds. For leaves,
regression based on the single character "margins entire"
gave the most accurate results, with errors less than 5 degrees
centigrade at the modern sites. For wood, CCA using 13 anatomical
characters gave the most accurate results, although errors were larger
than those for leaves. CCA revealed that, unlike leaf physiognomy, a
change in wood physiognomy occurs between temperate and tropical
regions, with temperate wood physiognomy more strongly influenced by
MAT than tropical wood physiognomy. Therefore the use of wood to
compute paleotemperature from fossil assemblages that have a tropical
component (as does the Clarno assemblage) is questionable.
Key words: Clarno, leaf morphology, paleotemperature, temperature, wood anatomy