The climatic space of European pollen taxa

Abstract

Pollen data are widely used to reconstruct past climate changes, using relationships between modern pollen abundance in surface samples and climate at the surface-sample sites as a calibration. Visualization of modern pollen data in multidimensional climate space provides a way to establish that taxon abundances are well behaved before using them in climate reconstructions. Visualization is also helpful for ecological interpretation of variations in pollen abundance in space and time. Here, we present Generalized Additive Models for the distribution of 195 European pollen and pteridophyte spore taxa in a bioclimate space defined by seasonal temperatures (as mean temperature of the coldest month and annual growing degree days) and an annual moisture index. These models can be used to explore the realized climate niche of pollen taxa and to build statistical models for palaeoclimate reconstruction. The data set is released under a Creative Commons BY license. When using the data set, we kindly request that you cite this article.