Bayesian approaches to proxy uncertainty quantification in paleoecology: A mathematical justification and practical integration

Abstract

Paleoenvironmental data are essential for reconstructing environmental conditions in the distant past, and these reconstructions strongly depend on proxies and age–depth models. Proxies are indirect measurements that substitute for variables that cannot be directly measured, such as past precipitation. Conversely, an age–depth model is a tool that correlates the observed proxy with a specific moment in time. Bayesian age–depth modelling has proved to be a powerful method for estimating sediment ages and their associated uncertainties. However, there remains considerable potential for further integration into proxy analysis. In this paper, we explore a mathematical justification and a computational approach that integrates uncertainty at the age–depth level and propagates it to the proxy scale in the form of a posterior predictive distribution. This method mitigates potential biases and errors by removing the need to assign a single age to a given proxy measurement. It allows for quantifying the likelihood that proxy data values correspond to modelled ages, thus enabling the quantification of uncertainty in both the temporal and proxy value domains. The use of Bayesian statistics in proxy analysis represents a relatively recent advancement. We aim to mathematically justify incorporating the Markov chain Monte Carlo output from age–depth models into proxy analysis and to present a novel methodology for constructing environmental reconstructions using this approach.