Late Quaternary Vegetation History of Mongolia

Abstract

Studies on past changes in vegetation are a central key to understanding modern plant distribution, to reconstructing past climates, and to testing biome and climate models. This chapter is an initial attempt to reconstruct and to map spatial changes in the vegetation across Mongolia since ca 15,000 14C yr B.P. Our work is a logical continuation of extensive studies on the late Quaternary vegetation and environments of Mongolia done by Soviet and Mongolian scientists during recent decades (Giterman et al., 1968; Lavrenko & Rachkovskaya, 1976; Dinesman et al., 1989; Logatchov, 1989; Sevastyanov et al., 1994; etc.). Since the main publications only are published in Russian and poorly accessible for the English speaking scientific community, we first briefly will summarize previous studies, which reconstructed regional vegetation changes in Mongolia. These vegetation reconstructions are broadly correct, but some major discrepancies do appear. This summary demonstrates that Mongolian pollen records, rather than other sources of paleobotanical data, are the main information source for vegetation reconstructions and that these are based on relationships between modern pollen spectra and actual vegetation. Moreover, we will describe some potential problems that different types of sediments can cause in the interpretation of fossil pollen spectra.