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Reconstructing Paleoenvironments Of The Plio-Pleistocene Tamiami Formation Of Florida With Benthic Foraminifera, Heather Bender

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There is general agreement that a range of paleodepths and environments are represented in the individual shell units of the middle Pliocene to earliest Pleistocene Tamiami Formation of southwest Florida, but maximum depths remain poorly constrained. Here, benthic Foraminifera abundances are used as a paleoenvironmental proxy to compare the upper Tamiami from quarries in Sarasota, Florida to Recent modern coastal, bay, and reef habitats of Florida, the Grand Cayman Islands, and Puerto Rico, ranging in depth from 0 to 55 meters. I used: (1) ordination techniques, including detrended correspondence analysis (DCA) and cluster analysis, to compare upper Tamiami foraminiferal assemblages …