Multiproxy records of temperature, precipitation and vegetation on the central Chinese Loess Plateau over the past 200,000 years

The strength of the East Asian Summer Monsoon (EASM) and associated moisture availability have been linked to the spatial distribution of occurrence of C3 and C4 vegetation on the Chinese Loess Plateau (CLP). Variations in the stable carbon isotopic composition of organic matter in loess-paleosol sequences from several locations on the CLP indicate that vegetation has shifted from mainly C3 plants during cool, dry glacials to more C4 plants during warm, wet interglacials. Although increased temperatures generally lead to an expansion of C4 vegetation, increased humidity has an opposite effect, as does increasing pCO2, leaving the exact driver(s) of vegetation change, and thus EASM strength, elusive. Here we reconstruct continuous, directly comparable records of air temperature, monsoon precipitation, and vegetation type over the past 200,000 years based on branched glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraether (brGDGT) membrane lipids, plant leaf waxes and their isotopic stable carbon and hydrogen isotopic composition (δ13Cwax and δ2Hwax, respectively) preserved at Lingtai on the central CLP. BrGDGT-based temperatures vary between 12 and 21 °C over glacial-interglacial cycles, and consistently lead changes in loess proxies (grain size, magnetic susceptibility), as also observed elsewhere on the CLP. Variations in δ13Cwax are only minor (