Modern pollen from the catchment and surficial sediments of a Scottish sea loch (fjord)

Abstract

Modern pollen was extracted both from moss polster samples collected from a range of sites across the land surface of the Loch Sunart catchment, north‐west Scotland and from a number of marine sediment‐water interface sites in the sea loch. Comparisons between the pollen results and the major vegetation types growing in the catchment area revealed that in general the moss polsters contained a localised picture of the vegetation whilst the sea loch sediments varied much less from sample to sample and better represented a regional picture of the vegetation. It was anticipated that the pollen in the sea loch samples would be in a much poorer state of preservation because of the many pathways through which it travels in order to become incorporated into the sediments of the loch. However, this proved not to be the case and the study demonstrates that marine sediments of the kind found in Loch Sunart have the potential to provide a new source of Holocene vegetation data which is as good as the freshwater lake sediments that have been preferentially sampled in the past.

Keywords:

• Pollen‐vegetation relationships
• moss polsters
• marine sediments
• pollen preservation
• fjords

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Richard Bates, Alix Cage, Jack Jarvis and Fabienne Marret for assistance in the field, to Margaret Donaldson for assistance with pollen preparations, John Walden for assistance with statistical analysis and to Graeme Sandeman for drawing some of the diagrams. We are grateful to the Carnegie Trust for the universities of Scotland and the EU funded project (HOLSMEER) for financial support.