Pollen-based land-cover change in Europe over the Holocene : exploring the resilience of vegetation communities and species dynamics through time
Résumé
It is crucial to improve our understanding of landscape and land-use histories in Europe during the Holocene to evaluate the effects of future climate and land-use change on European ecosystems, landscapes and biodiversity. As part of the Terranova project (H2020-msca-itn-2018), we present here
the “third generation” of pollen-based estimates of plant cover in Europe over the Holocene using the REVEALS model (Sugita 2007). This model corrects biases caused by inter-taxonomic differences in pollen production and dispersal in pollen records. The new reconstruction improves the spatial cover of the first and second generation of REVEALS reconstructions (Trondman et al. 2015 and Githumbi et al., 2021, respectively) with a large number of additional pollen records, in particular from the Mediterranean area (Italy, Spain, Portugal). The regional vegetation abundance is estimated for 31 taxa at a spatial resolution of 1°x1° (ca. 100 km x 100 km) for consecutive time windows over the last 11.7 ka BP (500 years from 11.7 to 0.7 ka BP and higher time resolution from 0.7 ka BP). This new dataset provides unique possibilities to explore spatial-temporal changes in past land cover and biodiversity over long time periods. According to the identification of seven biogeographic regions during the Holocene and its
movements and shifts from the last glacial maximum to the present time (Röhm et al., in prep), REVEALS estimates are explored. This analysis is performed at the level of species and biogeographic regions in Europe, to analyse biodiversity and to understand which species or groups of species are consistent in time and space and which of these have migrated. The challenge is to determine whether it is the stability in time and space of species or their flexibility to environmental changes that makes them resilient. Furthermore, knowing the importance of this long-term dataset, there is a need to analyse whether the recent changes are a continuum of the general trend of the Holocene or are traits of the Anthropocene for conservation ecology in the face of environmental changes.