Abstract

Quantitative reconstructions of past land-cover are necessary for research into the processes involved in climate-human-land interactions. We present the first temporally continuous pollen-based land-cover reconstruction for Europe over the Holocene (last 11,700 cal yr BP). We describe how vegetation cover has been quantified from pollen records at a 1° × 1° spatial scale using the ‘Regional Estimates of VEgetation Abundance from Large Sites’ (REVEALS) model. REVEALS has been applied to 1128 pollen records across Europe and part of the Eastern Mediterranean-Black Sea-Caspian-Corridor (30°–75° N, 25° W–50° E) to reconstruct the cover of 31 plant taxa assigned to 12 plant functional types (PFTs) and three land-cover types (LCTs). A new synthesis of relative pollen productivities (RPPs) available for European plant taxa was performed for this reconstruction. It includes > 1 RPP values for 39 taxa, and single values for 15 taxa (total of 54 taxa). As an illustration, we present maps of the results for five taxa (Calluna vulgaris, Cerealia-t, Picea abies, Quercus deciduous and Quercus evergreen) and three LCTs (open land (OL), evergreen trees (ET) and summer-green trees (ST)) for 8 selected time windows. We discuss the reliability of the REVEALS reconstructions and issues related to the interpretation of the results in terms of landscape openness and human-induced vegetation change. We then describe the current use of this reconstruction and its future potential utility and development. The REVEALS data presented here can be downloaded from https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.937075?format=html#download.

Highlights

  • The reconstruction of past land cover at global, continental and sub-continental scales is necessary for the evaluation of climate models, land-use scenarios and the study of past climate – land cover interactions

  • In this paper we present the results of the second generation of REVEALS-based reconstruction of plant cover over the Holocene in Europe, the first generation being the reconstruction published by Trondman et al (2015)

  • Pollen from e.g. ruderals often related to agriculture such as Artemisia, Amaranthaceae/Chenopodiaceae, and Rumex acetosa type are included in the land-cover type open land; changes in cover of open land in the Eastern Mediterranean-Black Sea-Caspian-Corridor may be related to changes in agricultural land. Aggregation of pollen counts to time windows depends on age-depth models

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Summary

Introduction

The reconstruction of past land cover at global, continental and sub-continental scales is necessary for the evaluation of climate models, land-use scenarios and the study of past climate – land cover interactions. Vegetation reconstructions for Europe based on pollen data have used community-level approaches (Huntley, 1990), biomization methods (Davis et al, 2015; Prentice et al, 1996), modern analogue technique (MAT; Zanon et al, 2018), and pseudobiomization (Fyfe et al, 2015) These approaches capture the major trends in vegetation patterns over the course of the Holocene (Roberts et al, 2018) and biomization methods have proved useful for evaluation of climate model results (e.g. Prentice and Webb III, 1998). The results of these forms of pollen data manipulation either classify pollen data into discrete classes (e.g. biomization, pseudobiomization) or are semi quantitative, providing at best rough estimates of the relationship between forest and open-land cover (e.g. MAT). The number of pollen records used (1128), the area covered and time length (entire Holocene) are a significant advance on the results presented in Trondman et al (2015), which used 636 pollen records covering NW Europe (including Poland and the Czech Republic and excluding western Russia and the Mediterranean area), and produced estimates for five time windows (in cal yr BP, hereafter abbreviated BP): 6200-5700, 4200-3700, 700-

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