Late-glacial and Holocene European pollen data

ABSTRACT

The European Pollen Database (EPD) is a community effort to archive and make available pollen sequences from across the European continent. Pollen sequences provide records that may be used to infer past vegetation and vegetation change. We present here maps based on 828 sites from the EPD giving an overview of changes in postglacial pollen assemblages in Europe over the past 15,000 years. The maps show the distribution and abundance of 54 different pollen taxa at 500 year intervals, supported by new age-depth models and associated chronological uncertainty analysis. Results show the individualistic patterns of spread of different pollen taxa, and provide a standardized dataset for further analysis, defining a spatial context for the study of past plant and vegetation changes and other aspects of environmental history in Europe.

KEYWORDS:

• Pollen
• Europe
• vegetation
• late-glacial
• Holocene

Acknowledgements

We thank all European palynologists past and present for their contributions to the European Pollen Database, as well as the numerous researchers who have contributed time to the maintenance and upkeep of this database. The database used for the construction of these maps is available at: http://www.europeanpollendatabase.net/ and site chronologies with uncertainties are stored at http://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.804597.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCiD

Simon Brewer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6810-1911

Thomas Giesecke http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5132-1061

Walter Finsinger http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8297-0574

Graciela Gil-Romera http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5726-2536

Petr Kuneš http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9605-8204

Richard H. Bradshaw http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7331-2246

Additional information

Funding

The contribution of SB was funded by NSF [grant number EAR-1003848] and TG was funded by DFG [grant number GI 732/5-1].