Palynological richness and pollen sample evenness in relation to local floristic diversity in southern Estonia

Meltsov, Vivika; Poska, Anneli; Odgaard, Bent Vad; Sammul, Marek; Kull, Tiiu

doi:10.1016/j.revpalbo.2011.06.008

Cited by 70 publications

(85 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…Sepp€ a (1998) indicates that increases in pollen richness are associated with rapid community change and Meltsov et al (2011) indicate that increased local richness is related to pollen source area and productivity. If the plant community composition strongly affects pollen richness, but plant community richness does not, how might we begin to understand patterns of plant richness through time?…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While pollen richness at a site may vary over time, temporal changes in richness may not be directly correlated with regional plant species richness. A study of nine sites in Estonia demonstrated that palynological richness may be largely controlled by variability in local pollen productivity (Meltsov et al 2011). At coarse spatial scales, where multiple vegetation zones may be encountered, differences in catchment area may play a much larger role in determining richness (Sepp€ a 1998).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Pollen assemblage richness does not reflect regional plant species richness: a cautionary tale

et al. 2013

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Summary1. Palaeoecological records of species richness spanning time intervals over which climate variables have shifted relative to one another can help reduce issues of colinearity that might affect our understanding of patterns of species richness.2. Fossil pollen assemblages have the potential to serve as a proxy for past plant richness because they record the presence of plant taxa. However, pollen assemblages are typically limited by low taxonomic resolution and taphonomic processes (pollen production, transport, deposition and preservation), which may degrade the degree to which pollen accurately represents vegetation communities.3. We combined pollen assemblages from modern lake sediments (n = 546; n = 167 in British Columbia, Canada) in the Pacific Northwest, with a detailed data base (n = 16 071) of plant presence across the province and a published record of gamma richness to test the accuracy of pollen assemblages as a proxy for regional patterns of plant richness. 4.A generalized linear model using plant richness resolved at multiple taxonomic levels suggests taxonomic differences between plant and pollen taxa may reduce the ability of pollen richness to predict plant richness at the site level, but that this relationship is still recoverable, albeit with broad confidence intervals. 5.Spatially explicit analysis using a generalized additive model shows that predicted plant richness has no relationship with raw pollen assemblage richness at all taxonomic levels.6. The taxonomic composition of the region (i.e. the ratio of wind-pollinated to insect-pollinated species) and/ or the morphological specificity of the dominant pollen types in the region may play a role in limiting the reconstruction of plant richness from pollen richness. Nonetheless, we believe this study is the first to empirically test the relationship between plant and pollen richness, and fails to find a significant relationship.7. Synthesis. Palynological richness in itself cannot be considered a universally reliable proxy for inferring plant richness; however, broad spatial and temporal patterns of change in richness have been reported in the literature. Our findings suggest that more work is needed to understand previously reported patterns of pollen assemblage richness through time and in space. We suggest the use of functional diversity or phylogenetically based analysis may help link pollen richness to plant community richness.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pollen assemblage richness does not reflect regional plant species richness: a cautionary tale

et al. 2013

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“…The overall palynological richness of the samples also remains relatively constant, presumably reflecting the small size of the areas investigated and the consistency of the species pool across both sites. That the open areas are more palynologically diverse is likely to result from the greater palynological influence of the woodland on the open communities than the reverse, as a result of the higher production and greater dispersal of tree pollen (Meltsov et al, 2011;Birks et al, 2016). There is a negative relationship between pollen richness and floristic richness when rarefaction values are compared.…”

Section: The Modern Vegetation and Pollen Datasetsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disentangling the pollen signal from fen systems: Modern and Holocene studies from southern and eastern England

Waller

Carvalho

Grant

et al. 2017

Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology

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Thick deposits of peat derived from fen environments accumulated in the coastal lowland areas adjacent to the North Sea during the middle and late Holocene. These sediments are frequently used in pollen-based reconstructions of in situ and more distant vegetation. However, discriminating between wetland and dry land originating pollen signals, and between the potential fen communities present in the wetland, is complex. In this study, a suite of analytical approaches are used to explore the pollen signal of modern fen communities and compare them against Holocene pollen assemblages. At two sites in eastern England, Woodwalton Fen and Upton Broad, vegetation composition was recorded around a series of moss polster sampling points. The communities investigated included herbaceous fen communities under different cutting regimes, a grazed area, glades, and woodland with canopies dominated by Alnus glutinosa and Betula. Cluster analysis is used to provide an overview of, and compare the structure within, the datasets consisting of the vegetation, the vegetation converted to palynological equivalents, and the pollen data. It is demonstrated that any loss of taxonomic precision in pollen identifications does not pose particular problems when attempting to identify fen communities, including tall-herbaceous vegetation, in the pollen record. Indices of Association imply pollen presence can be interpreted as indicating the local presence for some taxa, though few of these are confined to a particular community. Herbaceous fen vegetation subject to different management regimes are, however, shown to produce distinctive pollen signatures. Middle and late Holocene pollen assemblages from eastern (Fenland) and southern (Romney Marsh) England, interpreted as derived from fen vegetation, are compared against the modern pollen dataset using ordination. Most of the fossil samples plot out within or adjacent to the groupings produced by the modern samples in the ordinations. While these investigations demonstrate that modern pollen work can help improve the interpretation of Holocene assemblages they also call attention to a number of limitations including the restricted range of communities from which modern samples are currently available and the potential for non-analogous modern vegetation. The paper concludes with ideas to aid the interpretation of pollen data collected from fen peats and suggestions for future work.

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“…Moreover, it now makes it possible to reconstruct past floristic diversity using the two parameters: richness and evenness. Richness is the number of species within a specific area, which may be estimated using palynological richness, i.e the number of different pollen taxa found in a sediment sample (Birks and Line, 1992;Odgaard, 1999;Van Dyke, 2008;Meltsov et al, 2011). Evenness is a measure of the relative abundance of the different species that are present within an area (Magurran, 2004), which may be estimated for common taxa by applying evenness indices to the REVEALS output (Fredh et al, 2012).…”

Section: Fredh Et Al: the Impact Of Land-use Change On Floristic mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Fall speed of pollen, relative pollen productivity estimates (PPE) and associated standard error estimates (SE) for 26 taxa obtained for southern Sweden (Sugita et al, 1999;Broström et al, 2004) and Denmark (numbers in bold; Nielsen et al, 2004) and that the pollen grains found in sediments only represent a small portion of all species in surrounding vegetation (Odgaard, 1994(Odgaard, , 2007Peros and Gajewski, 2008;van der Knaap, 2009). However, as a relative measure of floristic diversity, palynological richness has shown to be reliable (Meltsov et al, 2011(Meltsov et al, , 2013. Based on the proportional abundances estimated by the REVEALS model we calculated the Shannon index, which combines the number of taxa and the relative abundance between taxa to estimate floristic diversity (Magurran, 2004;Odgaard, 2007;van Dyke, 2008).…”

Section: Reconstruction Of Floristic Diversitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The impact of land-use change on floristic diversity at regional scale in southern Sweden 600 BC–AD 2008

Fredh

Broström²,

Rundgren

et al. 2013

Biogeosciences

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Abstract. This study explores the relationship between land-use and floristic diversity between 600 BC and AD 2008 in the uplands of southern Sweden. We use fossil pollen assemblages and the Regional Estimates of Vegetation Abundance from Large Sites (REVEALS) model to quantitatively reconstruct land cover at a regional scale. Floristic richness and evenness are estimated using palynological richness and REVEALS-based evenness, respectively. We focus on the period AD 350 to 750 to investigate the impact of an inferred, short-lived (< 200 yr) period of land-use expansion and subsequent land abandonment on vegetation composition and floristic diversity. The observed vegetation response is compared to that recorded during the transition from traditional to modern land-use management at the end of the 19th century. Our results suggest that agricultural land use was most widespread between AD 350 and 1850, which correlates broadly with high values of palynological richness. REVEALS-based evenness was highest between AD 500 and 1600 which indicates a more equal cover among taxa during this time interval. Palynological richness increased during the inferred land-use expansion after AD 350 and decreased during the subsequent regression AD 550–750, while REVEALS-based evenness increased throughout this period. The values of palynological richness during the last few decades are within the range observed during the last 1650 yr. However, REVEALS-based evenness shows much lower values during the last century compared to the previous ca. 2600 yr, which indicates that the composition of present-day vegetation is unusual in a millennial perspective. Our results show that regional scale changes in land use have had clear impacts on floristic diversity in southern Sweden, with a vegetation response time of less than 20 to 50 yr. We show the importance of traditional land use to attain high biodiversity and suggest that ecosystem management should include a regional landscape perspective.

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Palynological richness and pollen sample evenness in relation to local floristic diversity in southern Estonia

Cited by 70 publications

References 43 publications

Pollen assemblage richness does not reflect regional plant species richness: a cautionary tale

Pollen assemblage richness does not reflect regional plant species richness: a cautionary tale

Disentangling the pollen signal from fen systems: Modern and Holocene studies from southern and eastern England

The impact of land-use change on floristic diversity at regional scale in southern Sweden 600 BC–AD 2008

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