| 1. |
- Feurdean, Angelica, et al.
(author)
-
The influence of refugial population on Lateglacial and early Holocene vegetational changes in Romania
- 2007
-
In: Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology. - : Elsevier BV. - 0034-6667. ; 145:3-4, s. 305-320
-
Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Romania has for a long time been lacking good palaeoenvironmental records, particularly for the Late Quaternary. A chronological framework had been nearly absent and the vegetation development had been reconstructed entirely from pollen data. Data sets from this part of Europe are important for assessing the spatial variability of past vegetation and climatic changes and to reconstruct tree migration routes at the end of the last glacial period. New palaeobotanical evidence has enabled us to address this gap and to provide a more comprehensive picture of the Lateglacial and early Holocene continental environment. This paper reviews results from radiocarbon dated sequences in Romania with the aim to place them in a larger perspective with regard to glacial refugia and tree immigration, and to asses the vegetation response to climatic oscillation from the end of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) to the early Holocene. This study documents that some coniferous and broad-leaved trees were present prior to 14,700 cal. yr BP in Romania, and thus it appears that this region may have been a refugial area for some tree species. During the Lateglacial, the vegetation shows a distinct response to climatic oscillations at all elevations, although the response is stronger at mid attitude (800-1100 m. a.s.1) than at high altitudes. Moreover, smaller climatic oscillations are only recorded at sites situated at mid altitudes, probably because these areas were located close to the tree line ecotone. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
|
|
| 3. |
- Willis, Katherine J., et al.
(author)
-
How can a knowledge of the past help to conserve the future? Biodiversity conservation and the relevance of long-term ecological studies
- 2007
-
In: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Biological Sciences. - : The Royal Society. - 0962-8436 .- 1471-2970. ; 362:1478, s. 175-186
-
Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This paper evaluates how long-term records could and should be utilized in conservation policy and practice. Traditionally, there has been an extremely limited use of long-term ecological records (greater than 50 years) in biodiversity conservation. There are a number of reasons why such records tend to be discounted, including a perception of poor scale of resolution in both time and space, and the lack of accessibility of long temporal records to non-specialists. Probably more important, however, is the perception that even if suitable temporal records are available, their roles are purely descriptive, simply demonstrating what has occurred before in Earth's history, and are of little use in the actual practice of conservation. This paper asks why this is the case and whether there is a place for the temporal record in conservation management. Key conservation initiatives related to extinctions, identification of regions of greatest diversity/threat, climate change and biological invasions are addressed. Examples of how a temporal record can add information that is of direct practicable applicability to these issues are highlighted. These include (i) the identification of species at the end of their evolutionary lifespan and therefore most at risk from extinction, (ii) the setting of realistic goals and targets for conservation ‘hotspots’, and (iii) the identification of various management tools for the maintenance/restoration of a desired biological state. For climate change conservation strategies, the use of long-term ecological records in testing the predictive power of species envelope models is highlighted, along with the potential of fossil records to examine the impact of sea-level rise. It is also argued that a long-term perspective is essential for the management of biological invasions, not least in determining when an invasive is not an invasive. The paper concludes that often inclusion of a long-term ecological perspective can provide a more scientifically defensible basis for conservation decisions than the one based only on contemporary records. The pivotal issue of this paper is not whether long-term records are of interest to conservation biologists, but how they can actually be utilized in conservation practice and policy.
|
|
