Artemisia pollen dataset for exploring the potential ecological indicators in deep time

Abstract

Abstract. Artemisia, along with Chenopodiaceae is the dominant component growing in the desert and dry grassland of the Northern Hemisphere. Artemisia pollen with its high productivity, wide distribution, and easy identification, is usually regarded as an eco-indicator for assessing aridity and distinguishing grassland from desert vegetation in terms of the pollen relative abundance ratio of Chenopodiaceae/Artemisia (C/A). Nevertheless, divergent opinions on the degree of aridity evaluated by Artemisia pollen have been circulating in the palynological community for a long time. To solve the conclusion, we first selected 36 species from 9 clades and 3 outgroups of Artemisia based on the phylogenetic framework, which attempts to cover the maximum range of pollen morphological variation. Then, sampling, experiments, photography, and measurements were taken using standard methods. Here, we present pollen datasets containing 4018 original pollen photographs, 7200 statistical pollen morphological traits, information on 30858 source plant occurrences, and corresponding environmental factors. Hierarchical cluster analysis on pollen morphological traits was carried out to subdivide Artemisia pollen into three types. When plotting the three pollen types of Artemisia onto the global terrestrial ecoregions, different pollen types of Artemisia were found to have different habitat ranges. These findings change the traditional concept of Artemisia being restricted to arid and semi-arid environments. The data framework that we designed is open and expandable for new pollen data of Artemisia worldwide. In the future, linking pollen morphology with habitat via these pollen datasets will create additional knowledge that will increase the resolution of the ecological environment in the geological past. The Artemisia pollen datasets are freely available at Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5842909; Lu and Jiao, 2022).

Artemisia pollen dataset for exploring the potential ecological indicators in deep time

“…Pollen datasets (Table 3) including pollen photographs under LM and SEM, statistical data of pollen morphological traits, and their source plant distribution for each species are available at Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6900308; Lu et al, 2022).…”

“…The Artemisia pollen datasets are freely available at Zenodo (https://doi.org/10. 5281/zenodo.6900308;Lu et al, 2022).…”