Comparing pollen spectra from modified Tauber traps and moss samples: examples from a selection of woodlands across Europe

Abstract

This paper compares pollen spectra derived from modified Tauber traps and moss samples from a selection of woodland types from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Georgia, Greece, Poland, Switzerland and Wales. The study examines the representation of individual taxa in the two sampling media and aims to ascertain the duration of pollen deposition captured by a moss. The latter aim was pursued through the calculation of dissimilarity indexes to assess how many years of pollen deposited in a pollen trap yield percentage values that are most similar to those obtained from the moss. The results are broadly scattered; the majority of moss samples being most similar to several years of pollen deposition in the adjacent trap. 123Veget Hist Archaeobot (2010) 19:271-283 DOI 10.1007/s00334-010-0258-y 2 years of pollen deposition in the trap also revealed large differences. There is a tendency for bisaccate grains such as Pinus and Picea to have a higher representation in moss than in traps but there is considerable regional variation. The results indicate that pollen proportions from moss samples often represent the pollen deposition of one area over several years. However, bisaccate pollen grains tend to be over-represented in moss samples compared to both pollen traps and, potentially, lake sediments.

Evaluating the effect of flowering age and forest structure on pollen productivity estimates

“…The depositional environment has an influence on the pollen composition (Giesecke and Fontana 2008;Pardoe et al 2010) and when studying the pollen-vegetation relationship it is therefore important to standardize the size and type of sampling site as much as possible to reduce this variability. We aimed at sampling small lakes with a single, simple basin with as small a peat margin as possible and without permanent inflow.…”

Modern pollen rain and fungal spore assemblages from pasture woodlands around Lake Saint-Point (France)

“…However, he agreed with Caseldine (1981) who stated that the complete moss polster records at least 2 years of pollen rain. As other studies also showed that moss samples are likely to record one to five years of rain deposit (Räsänen et al, 2004;Pardoe et al, 2010), there is a general agreement to consider epigeic moss polsters as able to record at least one (often two) year of pollen production.…”

Biological proxies recorded in a Belukha ice core, Russian Altai

“…Since the maximum concentration of all identified biological objects in the ice core are within the period 1980-1990s, the calculation of average precipitation values for various types of ECM was performed for the period 1981-2000. A further justification for the use of this period only is that pollen productivity of individual plant species within the same plant communities can vary from year to year depending on the climatic conditions (Pardoe et al, 2010). However, pollen productivity for years within the dominant zonal circulation regime having similar climatic conditions (Bezuglova et.…”