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).

No abstract

Sedimentary charcoal records are used for understanding fire as an earth system process; however, no standardized laboratory methodology exists. Varying sample volumes and chemical treatments (i.e., type of chemical for length of time) are used for the deflocculation and extraction of charcoal from sediment samples. Here, we present the first systematic assessment of the effect of commonly used chemicals on charcoal area and number of fragments. In modern charcoal the area of fragments was significantly different depending on the chemical treatment. We subsequently applied H2O2 (33%), NaClO (12.5%), and HNO3 (50%) to a late-glacial–early Holocene paleorecord and tested different sample volumes. The effects of the treatments were consistent between modern and fossil experiments, which demonstrates the validity of applying results from the modern experiment to the fossil records. Based on our experiments we suggest (1) H2O2 33%, especially for highly organic sediments; (2) avoidance of high concentrations of NaClO for prolonged periods of time, and of HNO3; and (3) samples of 1 cm3 provided typically consistent profiles. Our results indicate that charcoal properties can be influenced by treatment type and sample volume, thus emphasizing the need for a common protocol to enable reliable multi-study comparisons or composite fire histories.

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 mapbased 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).