MITRA will focus on the reconstruction of rainfall and hydroclimate on various timescales, ranging from millennial to seasonal. Lacustrine (lake and marine) sediments will play a critical role in this objective, owing to their ability to record water-level changes, and hence the timing, and frequency, of past hydroclimatic changes. Seven kay lakes and wetlands have been selected along the Zagros mountains for this purpose, all of them are in close proximity to the cave sites and follow the same N-S transect. These sites include:

• Zeribar Lake - contains a considerable thickness of bottom sediments covering the entire Holocene, and good preservation of various bioindicators.
• Kermanshah Karstic Wetlands - palustrine wetland complexes located at in the heart of the Zagros Mountains. Several sediment cores from one of these wetlands (Hashilan Wetland) extend back into the LGM.
• Fars karstic wetlands Gomban and Rouzian - two karstic wetlands located in the Persepolis Basin, central Fars Province. Cores from both sites cover the Lateglacial and Holocene period.
• Fars lakes Maharlou and Tashk-Bakhtegan - large saline lake systems. Both have been cored and sediments cover the last ~15,000 years. The latter lake has a very drought-sensitive sedimentary archive, and incredibly well preserved palynomorphs.
• Hirom Lake-Wetland in the southern Fars Province - fed by rainfall and springs, and has provided promising archive covering the last 10,000 years.
• Meghregan Playa - the southernmost lake in the Iranian plateau is close to the Persian Gulf and northwest of the Strait of Hormuz. It is a hypersaline lake during the rainy season but becomes a salt plain in dry season. Because of its geographical position on the coastal area of the Gulf, it is possible that the playa recorded the Mid-Holocene high stand of the Gulf, and the direct effect of ISM summer rains on vegetation and hydrology.
• The Persian Gulf - a shallow semi-enclosed basin mostly desiccated during the last glacial period, was inundated during the Holocene. A series of sediment cores has been retrieved from the Persian Gulf by the Iranian National Institute for Oceanography & Atmospheric Sciences (main Iranian partner of the project) during the last 10 years. To date, these exceptional sediment archives were only coarsely sampled for preliminary geochemical and palynological investigations and radiocarbon dating, whereas the results show their exceptional potential for reconstructing both the spatio-temporal pattern of the flooding and abrupt climatic events of the Holocene.

WP 2 is led by Prof. Morteza Djamali, with core sampling, and analysis carried out by Dr Emma Gamba, Dr Elodie Brisset, Dr Majid Naderi, and Ms Arghavan Geranmayeh.

Djamali, M. et al. (2025) Higher in the mountains: Dynamics of agro-pastoral practices in a low-latitude mountain system (Karkas Mountains, central Iran) during the Mediaeval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. Quaternary Science Reviews 351: 109202

Ramzi, S. et al. (2024) IranVeg–the Vegetation Database of Iran: current status and the way forward. Vegetation Classification and Survey5: 237-256

Safaierad, R. et al. (2023) Vegetation and climate dynamics at the dawn of human settlement: multiproxy palaeoenvironmental evidence from the Hashilan Wetland, western Iran. Journal of Quaternary Science38(8): 1289-130

Sharifi, A. et al. (2015) Abrupt climate variability since the last deglaciation based on a high-resolution, multi-proxy peat record from NW Iran: The hand that rocked the Cradle of Civilization? Quaternary Science Reviews123: 215-230

Djamali, M. et al. (2011) Application of the global bioclimatic classification to Iran: implications for understanding the modern vegetation and biogeography. Ecologia Mediterranea37(1): 91-114

Djamali, M. et al. (2008) A late Pleistocene long pollen record from Lake Urmia, NW Iran. Quaternary Research69(3): 413-420