Abstract
Climate change and human activities influence the development of ecosystems, with human demand of ecosystem services altering both land use and land cover. Fossil pollen records provide time series of vegetation characteristics, and the aim of this study was to create spatially continuous reconstructions of land cover through the Holocene in southern Sweden. The Landscape Reconstruction Algorithm (LRA) was applied to obtain quantitative reconstructions of pollen-based vegetation cover at local scales, accounting for pollen production, dispersal, and deposition mechanisms. Pollen-based local vegetation estimates were produced from 41 fossil pollen records available for the region. A comparison of 17 interpolation methods was made and evaluated by comparing with current land cover. Simple kriging with cokriging using elevation was selected to interpolate the local characteristics of past land cover, to generate more detailed reconstructions of trends and degree of variability in time and space than previous studies based on pollen data representing the regional scale. Since the Mesolithic, two main processes have acted to reshape the land cover of southern Sweden, originally mostly covered by broad-leaved forests. The natural distribution limit of coniferous forest has moved southward during periods with colder climate and retracted northward during warmer periods, and human expansion in the area and agrotechnological developments has led to a gradually more open landscape, reaching maximum openness at the beginning of the 20th century. The recent intensification of agriculture has led to abandonment of less fertile agricultural fields and afforestation with conifer forest.
Highlights
Climate change and human land use have played important roles in the development and sustainability of ecosystems over temporal and spatial scales
By applying the interpolated Landscape Reconstruction Algorithm (LRA) approach to all fossil pollen sites in southern Sweden, this study provides an overview of local variations within a regional context, adding an intermediate spatial level to the analysis of pollen data in comparison with earlier studies that focused on specific local conditions (Cui and others 2014; Mazier and others 2015; Fredh and others 2017, 2019) or a large regional scale (Trondman and others 2015; Marquer and others 2014, 2017)
For the LRA application, we considered twenty-five pollen types and the relative pollen productivity estimates (RPPs) obtained from various regions in Europe (the LANDCLIM standard 2 dataset of Mazier and others (2012))
Summary
Climate change and human land use have played important roles in the development and sustainability of ecosystems over temporal and spatial scales (for example, Berglund and others 2008). The dependence on different ecosystem services has changed over time, in relation to changes in human lifestyle, technological advancements, and development of agricultural practice, with more rapid and extensive changes seen during the past 50 years than in any other time in human history (MEA 2005). The climate is changing due to human activities; these induced changes in temperature and precipitation may affect ecosystem functioning and distribution of species (IPCC 2014). Knowledge about the past is needed for improved model projections about ongoing climate and land use changes
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