Abstract
Abstract. The Eurasian (née European) Modern Pollen Database (EMPD) was established in 2013 to provide a public database of high-quality modern pollen surface samples to help support studies of past climate, land cover, and land use using fossil pollen. The EMPD is part of, and complementary to, the European Pollen Database (EPD) which contains data on fossil pollen found in Late Quaternary sedimentary archives throughout the Eurasian region. The EPD is in turn part of the rapidly growing Neotoma database, which is now the primary home for global palaeoecological data. This paper describes version 2 of the EMPD in which the number of samples held in the database has been increased by 60 % from 4826 to 8134. Much of the improvement in data coverage has come from northern Asia, and the database has consequently been renamed the Eurasian Modern Pollen Database to reflect this geographical enlargement. The EMPD can be viewed online using a dedicated map-based viewer at https://empd2.github.io and downloaded in a variety of file formats at https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.909130 (Chevalier et al., 2019).
Highlights
Modern pollen samples provide an essential source of information for interpreting and understanding the fossil pollen record, which in turn provides one of the most important spatially resolved sources of information on Quaternary vegetation and climate
The amount of data in the database has increased by 60 %, and the EMPD2 holds 8134 samples compared to 4826 samples in the EMPD1
The country that has experienced the largest increase in samples is Russia, which has gained 2274 more samples on top of the 379 samples already in the EMPD1 (Fig. 1)
Summary
Modern pollen samples provide an essential source of information for interpreting and understanding the fossil pollen record, which in turn provides one of the most important spatially resolved sources of information on Quaternary vegetation and climate. We use the term “fossil pollen” here as it is commonly used in the Quaternary sciences The fossils in this sense can more accurately be described as sub-fossils since they have usually only undergone limited (if any) postdeposition mineralisation, while pollen is taken to include many spores as well as the pollen from flowering plants. One of the early motivations for establishing large modern pollen datasets and one that still remains important is their use as calibration “training sets” for the quantitative reconstruction of past climate. This approach has more recently been adapted to quantitative reconstructions of land cover, where a similar modelling approach to climate reconstruction is applied to determine, for instance, forest cover. Modern samples have been used to establish and model the relationship between vegetation and pollen assemblages based on the different pollen productivity of different taxa and thereby provide quantitative estimates of past vegetation composition in a landscape from records of fossil pollen
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