Chapter 18 – Ostracoda as Proxies for Quaternary Climate Change: Overview and Future Prospects

Ostracod crustaceans are excellent Quaternary palaeoclimate proxies. As microfossils they supply evidence of past climatic conditions via indicator species, transfer function and mutual climatic range methods as well as the trace-element and stable-isotope geochemistry of their shells. We provide an overview of 17 contributions to the book Ostracoda as proxies for Quaternary climate change, highlight some of the emerging innovations and concerns, and assess the future prospects for ostracod applications in the field of Quaternary palaeoclimatology. The science of using ostracods as Quaternary palaeoclimate proxies has matured, well beyond the pioneering stage, and their application now needs to be tempered with critical awareness of their limitations. Key areas for future attention include palaeogenetics, improving knowledge of the ecology of living ostracods and the factors influencing their shell geochemistry, the establishment of global distributional databases and, as a necessary corollary to the last-mentioned, a programme of taxonomic harmonisation on a global scale. Finally, we emphasise the need for multi-proxy testing of methods, comparing ostracod-inferred climatic parameters with those derived from other proxies such as beetles, chironomids and foraminifera.