Modern pollen-vegetation relationships in the Taihang Mountains: Towards the quantitative reconstruction of land-cover changes in the North China Plain

Characteristics of spatial and temporal distribution of heavy rainfall and surface runoff generating process in the mountainous areas of northern China

“…As an important ecological barrier and water conversion area for the North China Plain and the Beijing-Tianjin region, China (Yang, 2021), the Taihang Mountain provides 3.6 billion m 3 of water to the North China Plain annually (Wang et al, 2014). Due to the high degree of heterogeneity of topography, geomorphology, rocks, soils, climate and vegetation (Geng et al, 2018) and variable climatic conditions, complex geography and intensive human activities (Zhang et al, 2021), the evolutionary regimes, influencing factors and driving mechanisms of hydrological processes are complex and subject to great spatial and temporal variability and uncertainty (Sakakibara et al, 2017). Therefore, it is essential to understand the characteristics of surface runoff generating process under different heavy rainfall events in the mountainous areas, especially in soil and rocky mountainous area where an ecologically fragile area with more complex rainfall-…”

Modern pollen assemblages and their relationships with vegetation and climate on the northern slopes of the Tianshan Mountains, Xinjiang, China

“…As one of the major proxies for the study of climatic environmental change, pollen plays an irreplaceable role in vegetation and climate reconstruction for the Quaternary Period (2.58 Ma-present) (Zhang et al, 2019(Zhang et al, , 2022Li et al, 2020;Chen et al, 2021a;Zhao et al, 2021). Because different plant species produce pollen that varies substantially in production, dispersal ability, deposition rate, and preservation conditions, indicators such as the percentage and concentration of surface pollen are not necessarily equivalent to the distribution and amount of vegetation at a certain time (Ge et al, 2017;Chen et al, 2021b;Zhang et al, 2021). Counting surface pollen assemblages to interpret, recover, and quantitatively reconstruct paleovegetation and paleoclimate culminates in inaccurate results (Xu et al, 2006(Xu et al, , 2015Zhang et al, 2018).…”

“…Moreover, this result has an important role in improving the accuracy of paleoclimate studies, and provides a reference for reconstructing the environmental evolution since the Holocene. Therefore, exploring the relationship between surface pollen assemblages and the present-day vegetation and climate in a region has important theoretical and applied values for Quaternary pollen studies (Chevalier et al, 2020;Ge et al, 2020;Li et al, 2020;Zhang et al, 2021).…”