Speleothem archives (cave carbonates) are widely distributed in terrestrial regions,
and provide highly resolved records of past changes in climate and vegetation encoded
in the oxygen and carbon isotope proxies. The SISALv2 database, created by the PAGES-SISAL
Phase 1 Working Group, provided 700 speleothem records from 293 cave sites, 500 of
which have standardized chronologies. The database provides access to records that
were hitherto unavailable in the original publications and/or repositories, and has
enabled regional-to-global scale analysis of climatic patterns using a variety of
approaches such as data-model comparisons. The PAGES-SISAL Phase 2 Working Group is
a continuation of the previous efforts to index speleothem datasets, focusing on the
following objectives: (i) exploring ways to synthesise modern cave monitoring data
to provide robust modern baselines and improve proxy interpretations, (ii) adding
trace element proxies of Mg, Sr, Ba, U, and Sr isotopes to the SISAL database to increase
our understanding of regional climatic variability, (iii) a database-update to incorporate
~100 identified speleothem datasets that are currently not in the database, (iv) providing
a javascript web app with a user-friendly GUI to increase SISAL data accessibility.Here,
we present preliminary information on available cave monitoring metadata synthesized
from the Cave Monitoring Database (product of a Cave Monitoring workshop in Innsbruck,
Austria) and published speleothem trace element records, highlighting regions where
overlapping stable isotope, trace element and monitoring datasets are available, and
identifying gaps. We show the proposed database structures for cave monitoring and
speleothem trace element data, linking them to the speleothem entities in the existing
SISAL database with persistent identifiers, and introduce the Beta version of the
SISAL GUI. We briefly present a synopsis of the SISAL-community level discussions
on best practices for reporting trace element data, and reducing data measured with
high resolution laser ablation methods. We welcome feedback on PAGES-SISAL Phase 2
activities listed above, and encourage participation and collaboration from interested
researchers in different stages of their academic career and working in different
geographical regions and allied disciplines.
