| 1. |
- Serge, M. A., et al.
(författare)
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Testing the Effect of Relative Pollen Productivity on the REVEALS Model : A Validated Reconstruction of Europe-Wide Holocene Vegetation
- 2023
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Ingår i: Land. - : MDPI. - 2073-445X. ; 12:5
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Reliable quantitative vegetation reconstructions for Europe during the Holocene are crucial to improving our understanding of landscape dynamics, making it possible to assess the past effects of environmental variables and land-use change on ecosystems and biodiversity, and mitigating their effects in the future. We present here the most spatially extensive and temporally continuous pollen-based reconstructions of plant cover in Europe (at a spatial resolution of 1 degrees x 1 degrees) over the Holocene (last 11.7 ka BP) using the 'Regional Estimates of VEgetation Abundance from Large Sites' (REVEALS) model. This study has three main aims. First, to present the most accurate and reliable generation of REVEALS reconstructions across Europe so far. This has been achieved by including a larger number of pollen records compared to former analyses, in particular from the Mediterranean area. Second, to discuss methodological issues in the quantification of past land cover by using alternative datasets of relative pollen productivities (RPPs), one of the key input parameters of REVEALS, to test model sensitivity. Finally, to validate our reconstructions with the global forest change dataset. The results suggest that the RPPs.st1 (31 taxa) dataset is best suited to producing regional vegetation cover estimates for Europe. These reconstructions offer a long-term perspective providing unique possibilities to explore spatial-temporal changes in past land cover and biodiversity.
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| 2. |
- Izdebski, A., et al.
(författare)
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Palaeoecological data indicates land-use changes across Europe linked to spatial heterogeneity in mortality during the Black Death pandemic
- 2022
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Ingår i: Nature Ecology & Evolution. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2397-334X. ; :6, s. 297-306
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The Black Death (1347–1352 CE) is the most renowned pandemic in human history, believed by many to have killed half of Europe’s population. However, despite advances in ancient DNA research that conclusively identified the pandemic’s causative agent (bacterium Yersinia pestis), our knowledge of the Black Death remains limited, based primarily on qualitative remarks in medieval written sources available for some areas of Western Europe. Here, we remedy this situation by applying a pioneering new approach, ‘big data palaeoecology’, which, starting from palynological data, evaluates the scale of the Black Death’s mortality on a regional scale across Europe. We collected pollen data on landscape change from 261 radiocarbon-dated coring sites (lakes and wetlands) located across 19 modern-day European countries. We used two independent methods of analysis to evaluate whether the changes we see in the landscape at the time of the Black Death agree with the hypothesis that a large portion of the population, upwards of half, died within a few years in the 21 historical regions we studied. While we can confirm that the Black Death had a devastating impact in some regions, we found that it had negligible or no impact in others. These inter-regional differences in the Black Death’s mortality across Europe demonstrate the significance of cultural, ecological, economic, societal and climatic factors that mediated the dissemination and impact of the disease. The complex interplay of these factors, along with the historical ecology of plague, should be a focus of future research on historical pandemics.
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| 3. |
- Gaillard, Marie-Jose, et al.
(författare)
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Application of modern pollen/land-use relationships to the interpretation of pollen diagrams - reconstructions of land-use history in South Sweden 3000-0 BP
- 1994
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Ingår i: Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology. - : Elsevier BV. - 0034-6667 .- 1879-0615. ; 82:1-2, s. 47-73
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- A modem pollen/land-use data-set of 124 surface samples (moss polsters) from different vegetation and land-use types in south Sweden is presented. The samples are from non-fertilized grazed areas, burned and grazed heaths, traditionally managed fodder-producing meadows and cultivated fields, and deciduous forests. Twenty nine environmental (e.g. management type, soil chemistry) variables are available for the 124 samples. Patterns of modern local pollen variation in relation to these environmental variables are explored by canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) and tested by associated statistical procedures. The modem data-set is used to aid interpretation of extra-local pollen sequences from two small lakes and one mire in south Sweden, using CCA as a means of comparing modem and fossil spectra. The resulting land-use reconstructions are compared to earlier interpretations of the same pollen-stratigraphical data using the more traditional ''indicator-species'' approach. Emphasis is placed on the history of mowing and grazing in south Sweden as an example of the potential uses of the comparative approach for interpretating fossil pollen data in terms of past land-use.
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