Improving the quality of pollen-climate calibration-sets is the primary step for ensuring reliable climate reconstructions

Abstract

Pollen-based climate reconstructions have been widely applied in China as an essential way to investigate quantitatively past climate change, which is necessary to improve the reliability of future climate predictions. However, their usefulness is often doubted, particularly for those regions with a long history of civilization (e.g. East China), where both the modern and past vegetation are heavily disturbed by human activities.Which factors influence the integrity of pollen-based climate reconstructions and how to improve their reliability are rigorous challenges for palynologists. Previous work focusing on these two questions has used modern pollen data from China or eastern continental Asia and mainly concludes that past climate reconstruction is quite sensitive to the quality of the calibration-set.