500‐Year Periodic Vegetation and Monsoonal Climate Oscillations During the Last Deglaciation in East Asia

Abstract

Changes in hydrothermal conditions had a major impact on the evolution of terrestrial ecosystems during the last deglaciation [from ∼19.00 to ∼11.70 Kyr b2k (thousand years before 2000 CE)] ( Cheng et al., 2009;Denton et al., 2010). Knowledge of the timing, cyclicity and phase relationships between changes in vegetation and the East Asian monsoon, and their linkage with high-and low-latitude climate change, is critical for understanding climate dynamics on centennial scale (Sun et al., 2016;Xu et al., 2013). However, modern ecological studies have focused mainly on the relationship between climate change and vegetation dynamics on decadal or shorter timescales. Modern vegetation distributions represent the integration of the effects of climate change on multiple timescales (Acosta et al., 2015). Hence, short-term vegetation monitoring alone is insufficient to explore the long-term evolution of ecosystems. However, pollen records from lacustrine sediments have been widely used to reconstruct past vegetation succession on centennial or longer timescales (