Fossil pollen data for climate reconstructions from El Cañizar de Villarquemado

Abstract

The sedimentary sequences from El Canizar de Villarquemado provide a palaeoenvironmental record from the western Mediterranean Basin spanning the interval from the last part of MIS6 to the late Holocene. Wei et al. (2019) have used Weighted Averaging Partial Least-Squares (WA-PLS) regression to derive quantitative reconstructions of winter and summer temperature regimes from the pollen data, expressed in terms of the mean temperature of the coldest month (MTCO) and growing degree days above a baseline of 0° C (GDD0) respectively, and a moisture index (MI), the ratio of annual precipitation to annual potential evapotranspiration, taking account of the effect of low CO2 on water use efficiency. Since Wei et al. (2019) used the SMPDS (Harrison, 2019: http://dx.doi.org/10.17864/1947.194) to derive modern pollen-climate relationships, the fossil pollen data from El Canizar de Villarquemado were assigned to the subset of pollen taxa recognised in the modern dataset. In addition to removing obligate aquatics, insectivorous plants, cultivated plants and non-native species, this involved amalgamating some taxa to a higher taxonomic level. There are 104 taxa represented in the final taxon list from El Canizar de Villarquemado. This dataset contains the pollen counts for the subset of the taxa that have been used to make climate reconstructions by Wei et al. (2019).