Coal composition was investigated by means of photometric and maceral analyses on closely spaced lithotype-based strip samples over the full thickness of several paralic coal seams from the Cretaceous Gates Formation of the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin. The aim of this investigation was to test various methods of identifying accommodation trends in coal and use them to refine sequence-stratigraphic interpretation of continental sediments. Conventional sequence stratigraphy derives its subdivisions and significant surfaces from the records left by relative sea-level oscillations. These records either do not project into the continental realm, or are difficult to recognise in elastic non-marine sediments. Paralic coal seams have been selected to study this problem, because they are not entirely removed from marine influence and, compared with most inorganic deposits, coal has stored a greater wealth of information that can be analysed at a higher level of resolution. The study has led to the identification of five new surfaces with chronostratigraphic potential in the sequence-stratigraphic analysis of non-marine sediments. Two of these surfaces, called paludification surface (PaS) and terrestrialisation surface (TeS), occur at the bases of the investigated coal seams, while two other surfaces, referred to as non-marine flooding surface (NFS) and give-up transgressive surface (GUTS), form the tops of the coal. The fifth and probably most important new surface, called the accommodation-reversal surface (ARS), is independent of any particular facies and may either coincide with some of the other surfaces or occur separately. The proportion of detrital minerals has been used as the chief discriminator between different mire types and accommodation trends. Other useful indicators of mire type and peat dispersal have been the proportions of sporinite and inertodetrinite, as well as some derived maceral and/or mineral ratios, e.g., the groundwater influence index and the tissue preservation index. Isometamorphic variations of telovitrinite reflectance and fluorescence, as well as their coefficients of variation were also found to contribute to the identification of cyclic shifts between balanced and unbalanced accommodation/peat accumulation ratios. Some of these cycles, which are backed up by elastic stratigraphy, appear to correspond to the development of shallowing-upward and deepening-upward parasequences. Superimposed high-frequency, low-amplitude perturbations in the coal cycles relate to smaller-scale accommodation cycles of sub-parasequence level, not always recognised in non-marine strata. These sub-parasequence coal cycles do not always continue the shallowing-upward trend typical of conventional parasequences. Several coals were found to contain stacks of small-scale cycles with upward increasing accommodation signatures either in their lower or upper halves, or over the whole seam section. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.