SyncER - Synchronicity testing for Event Records

Usage

SyncER is a toolbox developed to synchronize age-depth models and evaluate the potential synchronous deposition of correlated event deposits between geological records.

The vignette notebook presents the SyncER workflow by illustrating the different steps on a synthetic test dataset. This dataset is available as a seperate R package, SyncERdata. You can adjust the executable cells to apply it to your own dataset, but it is recommendable to instead copy the different steps to your personal R script for execution.

When using SyncER, cite the following paper:

Wils, K, Ramisch, A. (2026) Synchronicity testing for Event Records (SyncER) using log-ratios and tied age-depth models. Scientific Reports. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-67943-7

If you make use of the built-in compatibility with rbacon for age-depth modelling, you should also cite the original reference for this package:

Blaauw M, Christen J.A. (2011) Flexible paleoclimate age-depth models using an autoregressive gamma process. Bayesian Analysis 6 (3), 457-474. DOI: 10.1214/11-ba618.

If you make use of the built-in compatibility with rplum for age-depth modelling, you should cite the above reference for rbacon as well as the one below:

Aquino-López, M. A., Blaauw, M., Christen, J.A., and Sanderson, N. K. (2018) Bayesian analysis of 210Pb dating. Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Statistics 23 (3), 317-333. DOI: 10.1007/s13253-018-0328-7

To use the SyncER package, download it from CRAN and load it into your environment. The example dataset used throughout the vignette is distributed as the SyncERdata package, which needs to be installed separately.

{r SyncER-install} install.packages("SyncER") install.packages("SyncERdata") library(SyncER)

Reporting bugs

If you run into a problem or unexpected behaviour, please open an issue on the GitHub issue tracker or contact the developer. Questions and suggestions are welcome there too, and will be accommodated as much as reasonably possible. A report is most useful when it includes:

the version of SyncER you are running (packageVersion("SyncER")),
the output of sessionInfo(),
a minimal example that reproduces the problem — the bundled example dataset is ideal,
what you expected to happen, and what happened instead.

Disclaimer

SyncER is research software and is provided as is, without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied. The entire risk as to the quality and performance of the software is with you. Interpretations drawn from SyncER outputs remain the responsibility of the user. Synchronicity scores are conditional on the quality of the underlying age-depth models, and synchronized models gain precision without necessarily gaining accuracy — relative synchronicity is only ever evaluated with respect to the other records included.