Spatial and temporal distributions of major tree taxa in eastern continental Asia during the last 22,000 years

Abstract

lon) and Quercus on the southern Korean Peninsula (Yoon et al., 2011). Furthermore, Ren (2007) studied forest-cover changes in China north of the Yangtze River during the Holocene using a 40% threshold of arboreal pollen to map the forest-steppe boundary. However, the restricted spatial extent of the study areas means that these pioneering pollen-mapping studies are unable to provide a comprehensive picture of past vegetation changes beyond a regional scale.

Biome changes and their inferred climatic drivers in northern and eastern continental Asia at selected times since 40 cal ka bp

“…These previous studies provide valuable insights into the general pattern of vegetation changes. For example, during the last glacial-interglacial cycle, besides the temperature-driven south-north shift, the forest biomes extended north-westward after the last deglaciation (particularly during the Holocene) and shrank southeastward in the late Holocene (precipitation-driven) at the margins of the Asian Summer Monsoon (Ni et al 2014;Cao et al 2015;Tian et al 2016). In northern Siberia, the forest biomes shifted into the present tundra region during the early and middle Holocene, as revealed by macrofossil- (Binney et al 2009) and pollen-based vegetation reconstructions (Tarasov et al 1998(Tarasov et al , 2000Bigelow et al 2003;Rudaya et al 2016;Binney et al 2017;Zhilich et al 2017).…”

“…Broad-scale vegetation reconstructions have been undertaken that focus in part on eastern and northern Asia, including biomisation reconstruction (Ni et al 2014;Tarasov et al 1998Tarasov et al , 2000Bigelow et al 2003;Binney et al 2017), pollen data mapping (Cao et al 2015), quantitative tree-cover reconstruction (Tian et al 2016), and macrofossil data mapping (Binney et al 2009). These previous studies provide valuable insights into the general pattern of vegetation changes.…”

Quantitative woody cover reconstructions from eastern continental Asia of the last 22 kyr reveal strong regional peculiarities

“…Ren (2007) presents changes in forest cover in China during the Holocene using a greater than 40% arboreal pollen limit, but the various arboreal pollen taxa have different pollen representation factors (e.g. Xu et al, 2007;Cao et al, 2015). Zheng et al (2010) established a pollen calibration-set for woody cover reconstruction.…”

Biome changes in Asia since the mid-Holocene – an analysis of different transient Earth system model simulations

“…In eastern and central Asia, overall climate is assumed to be the major driver of forest decline (e.g. Wang et al, 2010;Cao et al, 2015;Tian et al, 2016).…”