Characterization of West African upwelling areas based on organic-walled dinoflagellate cysts and their application in the fossil record

This thesis deals with the paleo-ecological and paleo-climatic significance of organic-walled dinoflagellate cysts in the upwelling regions off SW and NW Africa. The results reveal that regional features are accurately reflected by the dinoflagellate cyst associations which is an important basis for paleostudies. Hereby, the calculation of dinocyst accumulation rate data has been shown to offer the opportunity to interprete the signals of single species independently from each other.