Preparing micromammalian data to be entered into a Southern Hemisphere database of Late Quaternary palaeoenvironmental information has confirmed several important requirements. These concern establishing consistency in the material and samples to be included. Specimens must be identified to the same taxonomic level, standard geographic and temporal units must be established, and adequacy of representation must be determined. Application of such treatment to the existing data set provided support for some previous analyses but emphasized that even during the Holocene it is possible to do little more at this stage than reach some very general conclusions. More samples are urgently needed. However, now that the process has been established it will be easier to prepare future samples consistently so that they can be fed into the database with a minimum of extra computation. (C) 1999 INQUA/Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
