Leaf margins and temperature in the North American flora: Recalibrating the paleoclimatic thermometer

For almost a century, leaf margin analysis has been an important method of estimating Cenozoic paleotemperatures. However, the relation between the proportion of toothed versus entire leaves and temperature has so far been calibrated and characterized using relatively small numbers of opportunistically and irregularly collected floras.Here we present the results of the first systematic spatially-distributed analysis of the relation between leaf margins and temperature for North America.We used species range maps of native North American dicot trees to derive synthetic local floras for each 50 km grid cell in the USA and Canada, and compared the percentage of entire-margined species with the mean annual temperature in each cell. Leaf margin type for each species was assigned using illustrations from appropriate regional North America floras.This analysis confirms that high-rainfall areas of the eastern USA and Canada show a strong inverse relationship between toothed margin percentage and mean annual temperature in the range 0–25 °C. The values we estimate are roughly similar to those obtained from floras in east Asia and previous analyses in North America, but the detailed curve is more complex, showing a distinct change in slope above a mean annual temperature of 20 °C. Wetter climate areas of the coastal western USA do not show any significant correlation between leaf margin percentage and temperature. This may relate to the confounding effect of the diverse topography of the West Coast, or it may be caused by the depleted dicotyledonous tree flora of this area.Like previous studies, this paper demonstrates that there indeed is a strong relationship between leaf margin percentage and temperature on a regional scale in eastern North America. However the relationship does not have the same linear behavior as results obtained from previous analyses. We discuss the implications of the results obtained here for paleoclimatic reconstruction in the content of other leaf margin analyses based on North American sites.