The data collection presented here is the data inventory of the VARved sediments DAtabase (VARDA) in version 1.3. VARDA is freely accessible and was created to assess outputs from climate models with high-resolution terrestrial palaeoclimatic proxies. All data were collected as raw data from freely available online sources, either from online data repositories (Pangaea, NOAA, and Neotoma) or data archives within the supplementary materials section of online publications. The current data collection consists of meta information and datasets from 95 lake archives. The data is stored in JSON and CSV format. All datasets are stored as individual files (JSON and CSV). Each dataset consists of samples for either i) chronologies; ii) radiocarbon data; iii) tephra layer; or iv) varve thickness data. Meta-information for each dataset is summarized in one csv and seven JSON files. Additional paleoclimate proxy data will be provided in forthcoming updates of VARDA.
The data collection of VARDA Version 1.3 is provided as an archive (.tar.gz) with the following files/folders. Overview lists with categories, cores, countries, datasets, lakes and publications included in VARDA. Each item in the lists is cross-referenced with the other files via its $ref property which includes the corresponding list index or the dataset's UUID (from the VARDA database). The data points themselves are provided in the "records" folder and named with each dataset's UUID respectively. For more information on the data structure please read the "index.html" file included in the archive and available on the DOI landing page.

VERSION HISTORY:

26 July 2020: release of Version 1.3:

1. Fix issues with chronologies in the export

2. Provide recalculated machine readable error estimates

3. Correct some metadata values (e.g. core labels)

5 March 2020: release of Version 1.1

1. Added fields:
   "distributor" - Field containing name of data distributor
   "url" - Field containing DOIs and URLs, which lead to the original data publications

2. Correction of publication DOIs in 9 cases

The version 1.0 is available in the "previous-versions" subfolder via the Data Download link. The index file is unchanged.