Steve Juggins, Environmental Change Research Centre, Department of Geography, University College London, 26 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AP, UK (UCFAMAR@UCL.AC.UK)
After having read about two powerful graphics programs (TILIA·GRAPH and PALYPLOT) developed in North America we decided, as an exchange of information, to describe some of the programs we use in Europe.Many pollen labs in Austria (Innsbruck), Switzerland (Basel, Bern, Lausanne), and Germany (Hannover, Hemmenhofen), are using POLPROF, a FORTRAN 77 program for calculating and drawing pollen diagrams. The program was developed by Andreas Tranquillini (Tranquillini 1988) in Innsbruck on the initiative of Prof. Sigmar Bortenschlager in the late 1970s and originally ran on mainframes. However, it has undergone several updates in the last ten years and is now available as a PC version running under DOS. It allows saw-edged pollen curves, expressed as percentages, concentration or influx values on a depth or age axis, to be viewed on the screen or output to a dot matrix or laser printer or a pen plotter. Some special features such as a "main pollen diagram" with (Iversen style) symbol curves for the major tree taxa and the AP/NAP line, and a lithology column with modified Troels-Smith (1955) symbols meet the requirements of many Central European pollen analysts (see Fig.1).
Commands concerning the height of the plot (limited by the height of paper -- on our plotter 78 cm), the type of diagram (percentage, concentration, influx), depth or age scale, the minimum occurrence of a taxon for it to be drawn, can be entered interactively or stored in a batch file. The program also has facilities for specifying the order of pollen curves and the location and width of the lithology column, for excluding individual taxa (e.g. Cyperaceae) from the pollen sum, and for the text notation of rare taxa.
Further details about the program and the conditions of use are available from Andreas Tranquillini (E-Mail: C102TA@AINUNI01.BITNET).
TRAN and ZONE are C++ programs written by Steve Juggins for the editing, transformation and zonation of palaeoecological data. TRAN was written to make pollen data stored in "Tranquillini" or other "condensed" formats accessible to other programs for statistical analysis, or database input. It will read Tranquillini, Polldata, Tilia (ASCII), Cornell (condensed or full), or Paradox format files, and convert to Tilia, Cornell, Gordon (full format, by taxa) or Paradox format. The Paradox input and output forms a link to the Alpine Pollen Database which is at present in statu nascendi under the directorship of Prof. Brigitta Ammann in Bern, Switzerland. Simple editing allows the deletion of taxa by type (e.g. aquatics, spores, etc.), number of occurrences or maximum abundance, the deletion of samples, and transformation to percentages or proportions. Condensed format files may also be printed as a full taxa by sample table or viewed spreadsheet style for data checking. TRAN therefore provides a convenient way to read a "raw" Tranquillini or Polldata file, delete aquatics, spores, etc., transform to percentages, delete additional rare taxa, and output in Cornell Condensed format for a PCA or CA using Cajo ter Braak's program CANOCO (ter Braak 1987). ZONE is based on the FORTRAN programs ZONATION and BARRIER, written by Alan Gordon, John Birks and John Line, and CONISS, written by Eric Grimm, and brings the following methods together in a single package for zoning palaeoecological data: CONSLINK - Constrained single link clustering, CONISS - Constrained incremental sum of squares clustering, SPLITLSQ and SPLITINF - Binary division using sum of squares and information statistic criteria, OPTIMAL PARTn. - Optimal partition using sum of squares criterion, BARRIER - Variable barriers approach (for details see: Gordon and Birks 1972; Birks & Gordon 1985; Grimm 1987). The program reads either Cornell or Gordon format files (usually after preprocessing by TRAN), and prints dendrograms on a line printer.
TRAN and ZONE are easy-to-use, menu driven programs with on-line help. They both run on PCs and are available free, with a short manual and test data sets, from Steve Juggins at the above address (but please include disks - two low density or one high density).
Birks, H.J.B. & Gordon, A.D. (1985) Numerical methods in Quaternary Pollen Analysis. Academic Press.
Grimm, E. (1987) CONISS: A FORTRAN 77 program for stratigraphically constrained cluster analysis by the methods of incremental sum of squares. Computers & Geoscience 13, 13-15.
Gordon, A.D. & Birks, H.J.B. (1972) Numerical methods in Quaternary palaeoecology. I. Zonation of pollen diagrams. New Phytologist 71, 961-979.
ter Braak, C.J.F. (1987) CANOCO - a FORTRAN program for canonical community ordination by (partial) (detrended) (canonical) correspondence analysis, principal components analysis and redundancy analysis (Version 2.1). TNO Institute of Applied Computer Science, Report 87 ITI A 11, 95 pp.
Tranquillini, A. (1988) POLPROF ein Programm zum computergesteuerten Zeichnen von Pollenprofilen. Ber. nat.-med. Verein Innsbruck, Suppl. 2, 27-34.
Troels-Smith, J. (1955) Characterization of unconsolidated sediments. Danm. Geol. Unders. IV/3, 10, 38-73.