Species clustering and New Zealand quaternary climate

This paper uses the relative frequencies of occurrence of various types of pollen and spores to indicate the comparative temperatures under which Quaternary sediments accumulated in several locations in New Zealand. The application of association measures, and cluster and discriminant function analysis to such information is described and discussed.The analyses show that the types may be divided into groups whose members vary little with locality or with the statistical methods used to establish them. This stability suggests that anomalous dispersion effects are not a major influence. For some of these groups there is a similarity between the present-day climate of known pollen or spore sources and those of the corresponding groups at the time of deposition. The significant groups are used to summarise the results in pollen diagrams which are compared with similar diagrams for the discriminant function. It is also shown that the methods described assist in locating zone boundaries in a series of samples taken from a bore hole.The results obtained are relevant to the interpretation of samples in which southern beech (Nothofagus fusca type) is the most abundant tree pollen.