Palaeoecologists use sequences of fossils within deposits from continents and oceans all over the world in order to produce time-series of past environmental dynamics over decades to millennia or longer. Such information can place current and future environmental change into context, for example by showing how climate, environments, ecosystems and humans interacted during past events, and by enabling verification of climate models through ‘hind-casting’ of such events. Through a meta-analysis and focused literature review of currently used statistical approaches in palaeoecological research, we highlight potential pitfalls and suggest ways forward to a fuller statistical understanding of the possibilities and limitations of palaeoecological studies. Statisticians or at least statistical reasoning should be involved in order to quantify uncertainties across the full analytical pipeline of obtaining, analysing and interpreting fossil time-series and could help optimizing the analytical decisions taken at all these steps. Supplementary materials accompanying this paper appear online.

中文翻译：

---

古环境研究统计回顾

古生态学家使用世界各地大陆和海洋沉积物中的化石序列，以产生过去几十年到几千年或更长时间的环境动态的时间序列。这些信息可以将当前和未来的环境变化置于背景中，例如通过展示气候、环境、生态系统和人类在过去事件中如何相互作用，以及通过对此类事件的“后推”验证气候模型。通过对古生态研究中目前使用的统计方法的荟萃分析和重点文献回顾，我们强调了潜在的陷阱，并提出了更全面地统计理解古生态研究的可能性和局限性的方法。应该涉及统计学家或至少是统计推理，以便量化获取、分析和解释化石时间序列的整个分析管道中的不确定性，并有助于优化在所有这些步骤中采取的分析决策。本文随附的补充材料出现在网上。