BUMPER v1.0: A Bayesian User-friendly Model for
Palaeo-Environmental Reconstruction
Abstract. We describe the Bayesian User-friendly Model for Palaeo-Environmental Reconstruction (BUMPER), a Bayesian transfer function for inferring past climate from microfossil assemblages. BUMPER is fully self-calibrating, straightforward to apply, and computationally fast, requiring ~ 2 seconds to build a 100-species model from a 100-site training-set on a standard personal computer. We apply the model's probabilistic framework to generate thousands of artificial training-sets under ideal assumptions. We then use these data to demonstrate the sensitivity of reconstructions to the characteristics of the training-set, considering assemblage richness, species tolerances, and the number of training sites. We find that a useful guideline for the size of a training-set is to provide, on average, at least ten samples of each species. We demonstrate general applicability to real data, considering three different organism types (chironomids, diatoms, pollen) and different reconstructed variables. An identically configured model is used in each application, the only change being the input files that provide the training-set environment and species-count data. The performance of BUMPER is shown to be comparable with Weighted Average Partial Least Squares (WAPLS) in each case. Additional artificial datasets are constructed with similar characteristics to the real data, and these are used to explore the reasons for the differing performances of the different training-sets.