Stable-carbon isotopes of U.S. great plains soils and climate events during the holocene

Many paleoclimate proxies are available to investigate Holocene events in the U.S. Great Plains. Pollen records cored from marshes and lakes in the Great Plains have long been one of the primary indicators of past vegetation, where floral species composition can reveal temperature and moisture conditions. The objective of this investigation is to determine whether specific Holocene climate phases and events could be identified in the soil organic carbon (SOC) isotopic record (not SOC%) of Great Plains soils by reexamining the soil profile records generated in the Follett et al. and Leavitt et al. studies. This objective is addressed on a spatial scale by generating SOC d¹³C maps for the time intervals of interest. With few exceptions, the time slices represented in maps from this study have not been previously published, and in all cases the maps were developed using a different methodology than that used by Leavitt et al.