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. The species composition of many groups of marine plankton appears wellpredicted by sea surface temperature (SST). Consequently, fossil planktonassemblages have been widely used to reconstruct past SST. Most applicationsof this approach make use of the highest possible taxonomic resolution.However, not all species are sensitive to temperature, and their distributionmay be governed by other parameters. There are thus reasons to question themerit of including information about all species, both for transfer functionperformance and for its effect on reconstructions. Here we investigate the effect of species selection on planktonicforaminifera transfer functions. We assess species importance for transferfunction models using a random forest technique and evaluate the performanceof models with an increasing number of species. Irrespective of using modelsthat use the entire training set (weighted averaging) or models that useonly a subset of the training set (modern analogue technique), we find thatthe majority of foraminifera species does not carry useful information fortemperature reconstruction. Less than one-third of the species in thetraining set is required to provide a temperature estimate with a predictionerror comparable to a transfer function that uses all species in thetraining set. However, species selection matters for paleotemperatureestimates. We find that transfer function models with a different number ofspecies but with the same error may yield different reconstructions of seasurface temperature when applied to the same fossil assemblages. Thisambiguity in the reconstructions implies that fossil assemblage changereflects a combination of temperature and other environmental factors. Thecontribution of the additional factors is site and time specific, indicatingecological and geological complexity in the formation of the sedimentaryassemblages. The possibility of obtaining multiple different reconstructionsfrom a single sediment record presents a previously unrecognized source ofuncertainty for sea surface temperature estimates based on planktonicforaminifera assemblages. This uncertainty can be evaluated by determiningthe sensitivity of the reconstructions to species pruning.

Sensitivity to species selection indicates the effect of nuisance variables on marine microfossil transfer functions