Representativeness of tree diversity in the modern pollen rain of <scp>A</scp>ndean montane forests

Jantz, Nele; Homeier, Jürgen; Behling, Hermann

doi:10.1111/jvs.12105

Cited by 33 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…A series of earlier studies have found similar positive correlations between pollen and plant richness in Europe (Birks, ; Felde et al, ; Matthias et al, ; Meltsov et al, ; Odgaard, ). However, investigations from the tropics (Gosling et al, ; Jantz, Homeier, & Behling, ) or from temperate western North America (Goring et al, ) have not found such positive correlations. Evaluating pollen–plant diversity relationships not only depends on the nature of pollen data but also on the spatial scale and quality of plant data (Birks, Felde, Bjune et al, ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Patterns of modern pollen and plant richness across northern Europe

et al. 2019

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Sedimentary pollen offers excellent opportunities to reconstruct vegetation changes over past millennia. Number of different pollen taxa or pollen richness is used to characterise past plant richness. To improve the interpretation of sedimentary pollen richness, it is essential to understand the relationship between pollen and plant richness in contemporary landscapes. This study presents a regional‐scale comparison of pollen and plant richness from northern Europe and evaluates the importance of environmental variables on pollen and plant richness. We use a pollen dataset of 511 lake‐surface pollen samples ranging through temperate, boreal and tundra biomes. To characterise plant diversity, we use a dataset formulated from the two largest plant atlases available in Europe. We compare pollen and plant richness estimates in different groups of taxa (wind‐pollinated vs. non‐wind‐pollinated, trees and shrubs vs. herbs and grasses) and test their relationships with climate and landscape variables. Pollen richness is significantly positively correlated with plant richness (r = 0.53). The pollen plant richness correlation improves (r = 0.63) when high pollen producers are downweighted prior to estimating richness minimising the influence of pollen production on the pollen richness estimate. This suggests that methods accommodating pollen‐production differences in richness estimates deserve further attention and should become more widely used in Quaternary pollen diversity studies. The highest correlations are found between pollen and plant richness of trees and shrubs (r = 0.83) and of wind‐pollinated taxa (r = 0.75) suggesting that these are the best measures of broad‐scale plant richness over several thousands of square kilometres. Mean annual temperature is the strongest predictor of both pollen and plant richness. Landscape openness is positively associated with pollen richness but not with plant richness. Pollen richness values from extremely open and/or cold areas where pollen production is low should be interpreted with caution because low local pollen production increases the proportion of extra‐regional pollen. Synthesis. Our results confirm that pollen data can provide insights into past plant richness changes in northern Europe, and with careful consideration of pollen‐production differences and spatial scale represented, pollen data make it possible to investigate vegetation diversity trends over long time‐scales and under changing climatic and habitat conditions.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Patterns of modern pollen and plant richness across northern Europe

et al. 2019

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“…However, care should be taken when applying family-level comparison because higher taxonomic levels, as Linnaean ranks, are a product of phylogeny as well as historical determination processes that change over time (Bertrand et al 2006), which makes each case unique. Moreover, complexities in determination increase when working with fossil pollen types (Jantz et al 2014). …”

Section: Pollen Rainàvegetation Relationshipmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…We recommend the use of higher-ranked systematic levels such as genera or families instead of species for unexplored remote areas like northwestern Pakistan. Taxonomic surrogacy at the family level seems to be the right choice for a comparison of pollen and plant taxa in the tropics (Odgaard 2001;Jantz et al 2014).…”

Section: Pollen Rainàvegetation Relationshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Plant family level is also sufficient for palaeoenvironmental reconstruction across the range of several different tropical regions such as the Neotropics (Punyasena 2008). Jantz et al (2014) found that taxonomic surrogacy at the family level is a good tool for comparing presenceÀabsence patterns of plant and pollen data in tropical regions with high tree diversity. The authors asserted that, on a family basis, pollen presenceÀabsence data represent the corresponding tree vegetation data, but uncertainties increase with decreasing altitude which can partly be explained by wind patterns, local abundance of shrubs and herbs and differences in evenness.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…They also provide the necessary basis for more quantitative views on past environmental conditions (Giesecke et al 2010;Urrego et al 2011;Jantz et al 2014). Modern pollen analogues are essential tools for palaeoecological reconstructions (Weng et al 2004;Huntley et al 2011;Sch€ uler et al 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Vegetation and pollen along a 200-km transect in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, northwestern Pakistan

2015

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This paper presents the first study on the relationship between vegetation and modern pollen rain along a 200-km elevational gradient (275À2600 m above sea level), in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province of northwestern Pakistan. A vegetation survey of 24 plots (six plots of 10 £ 10 m from four elevational zones) was carried out following the Braun-Blanquet method. The percentage cover of all taxa was documented and species were assigned to their respective families. Twenty-four surface samples (taken from the same plots from which the vegetation data were recorded), were processed according to standard methods for retrieving pollen grains. Based on a count of 300 pollen grains per sample, the percentage abundance of taxa in the pollen assemblages was compared to the corresponding percentage of cover abundance in the vegetation, at the family level. Results of the constrained incremental sum of squares (CONISS) derived from the pollen data reveal that the natural vegetation zonation is well reflected in pollen assemblages despite alteration of the vegetation by human activities. The identification of key taxa for the different vegetation zones improves our confidence to draw vegetation boundaries and distinguish the elevational zones along the gradient. The Spearman's rank correlation coefficient at P < 0.05 indicates a significant correlation between vegetation cover and pollen rain in Acanthaceae, Asteraceae, Cyperaceae, Euphorbiaceae, Poaceae, and Verbenaceae, whereas weak correlations were observed in Apiaceae, Balsaminaceae, Boraginaceae, Rubiaceae, and Saxifragaceae. Results based on the comparison of vegetation and the pollen spectra at the family level, and their transfer factors (TF), reveal that large-sized Asteraceae, Brassicaceae, Cannabaceae, Chenopodiaceae/Amaranthaceae, Myrtaceae, Poaceae/cereal pollen grains > 45 mm, and Polygonaceae reflect the proximity of cultivated land and human habitation in the lower three vegetation zones of Peshawar valley, lower montane Malakand hills and Swat valley. Contrarily, the abundance of the Dryopteridaceae, Pinaceae, Pteridaceae and certain spores reflects natural vegetation in the upper montane Malam Jabba zone.

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Palynological richness and evenness: insights from the taxa accumulation curve

Giesecke

Ammann

Brande

2014

Veget Hist Archaeobot

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Palynology provides the opportunity to make inferences on changes in diversity of terrestrial vegetation over long time scales. The often coarse taxonomic level achievable in pollen analysis, differences in pollen production and dispersal, and the lack of pollen source boundaries hamper the application of diversity indices to palynology. Palynological richness, the number of pollen types at a constant pollen count, is the most robust and widely used diversity indicator for pollen data. However, this index is also influenced by the abundance distribution of pollen types in sediments. In particular, where the index is calculated by rarefaction analysis, information on taxonomic richness at low abundance may be lost. Here we explore information that can be extracted from the accumulation of taxa over consecutive samples. The logtransformed taxa accumulation curve can be broken up into linear sections with different slope and intersect parameters, describing the accumulation of new taxa within the section. The breaking points may indicate changes in the species pool or in the abundance of high versus low pollen producers. Testing this concept on three pollen diagrams from different landscapes, we find that the break points in the taxa accumulation curves provide convenient zones for identifying changes in richness and evenness. The linear regressions over consecutive samples can be used to interand extrapolate to low or extremely high pollen counts, indicating evenness and richness in taxonomic composition within these zones. An evenness indicator, based on the rank-order-abundance is used to assist in the evaluation of the results and the interpretation of the fossil records. Two central European pollen diagrams show major changes in the taxa accumulation curves for the Lateglacial period and the time of human induced land-use changes, while they do not indicate strong changes in the species pool with the onset of the Holocene. In contrast, a central Swedish pollen diagram shows comparatively little change, but high richness during the early Holocene forest establishment. Evenness and palynological richness are related for most periods in the three diagrams, however, sections before forest establishment and after forest clearance show high evenness, which is not necessarily accompanied by high palynological richness, encouraging efforts to separate the two.

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Representativeness of tree diversity in the modern pollen rain of Andean montane forests

Cited by 33 publications

References 47 publications

Patterns of modern pollen and plant richness across northern Europe

Patterns of modern pollen and plant richness across northern Europe

Vegetation and pollen along a 200-km transect in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, northwestern Pakistan

Palynological richness and evenness: insights from the taxa accumulation curve

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