AQUADATA and QUATDB

In 1991, under joint funding from the National Greenhouse Advisory Commission  and the Bureau of Mineral Resources (now the Geoscience Australia) a project began with the aim of developing a database of Quaternary climate change research in the Australian region. By gathering data from published sources, it was intended that this database would generate a set of maps for comparison with general circulation model output. As a first step, a bibliography of Australasian Quaternary literature (Bleys et al., 1994) was compiled.

Over the next five years the Quaternary Climates Database (QUATDB) structure was designed by Geoff Hunt and Tim Barrows and adapted for the relational database ORACLE by Sonja Lenz. With the help of staff from the Australian National University (including Dr Michael Ayress, Allison Barrie, Paul Burckle, Robyn Bartel and Claire Findlay), data associated with ~1000 sites was entered. The database was fully described in Hunt, et al., (1996).

In February 1996, the CLIMANZ IV conference was held in Canberra, Australia. Researchers were invited to submit supporting data relevant to their findings, thereby creating a role for the database as a site for data storage for researchers. Base maps showing sites and climate estimates were constructed from data extracted from QUATDB. Additionally, a paper was published describing a revision of last glacial maximum sea-surface temperatures in the Australian region (Barrows etal., 1996). The maps that formed the basis of this paper were constructed from data stored within QUATDB.

Following the conclusion of funding in 1996, QUATDB was discontinued. Custodianship of  the data within QUATDB was transferred to Tim Barrows. The highest quality data  was extracted from ORACLE, and reformatted into spreadsheet form with additional data. These datasets formed the basis of the initial version of the Australian Quaternary Data Archive (AQUADATA).

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