Two hundred years of land-use change in the South Swedish Uplands: comparison of historical map-based estimates with a pollen-based reconstruction using the landscape reconstruction algorithm

Mazier, Florence; Broström, Anna; Bragée, Petra; Fredh, Daniel; Stenberg, Li; Thiere, Géraldine; Sugita, S.; Hammarlund, Dan

doi:10.1007/s00334-015-0516-0

Cited by 56 publications

(71 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…Our analyses together with earlier studies (Felde et al, ; Matthias et al, ) suggest that methods accommodating pollen‐representation bias in pollen richness studies warrant further attention and should become as widely used as pollen‐production transformations in land‐cover reconstruction studies (e.g. Mazier et al, ; Mehl & Hjelle, ; Roberts et al, ).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 62%

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: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 62%

Patterns of modern pollen and plant richness across northern Europe

et al. 2019

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“…In bold: large lakes Veget Hist Archaeobot (2016) 25:131-151 133 of past vegetation composition have already been shown to be useful for (i) the quantitative reconstruction of vegetation/plant cover at the local spatial scale (10-100 km 2 ) using Sugita's LRA (e.g. Nielsen and Odgaard 2010;Cui et al 2013Cui et al , 2014Mazier et al 2015;Hultberg et al 2015), (ii) the study of regional spatio-temporal land-cover/landscape dynamics over the past millennia (e.g. Marquer et al 2014;Fyfe et al 2013;Nielsen et al 2012;Trondman 2014), (iii) the evaluation of anthropogenic land-cover change scenarios (ALCCs) (Gaillard et al 2010) and (iv) the study of land cover-climate interactions in the past (Strandberg et al 2014).…”

Section: Figmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are pollen records from small sites appropriate for REVEALS model-based quantitative reconstructions of past regional vegetation? An empirical test in southern Sweden

Trondman

Gaillard

Sugita

et al. 2015

Veget Hist Archaeobot

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In this paper we test the performance of the Regional Estimates of VEgetation Abundance from Large Sites (REVEALS) model using pollen records from multiple small sites. We use Holocene pollen records from large and small sites in southern Sweden to identify what is/are the most significant variable(s) affecting the REVEALS-based reconstructions, i.e. type of site (lakes and/or bogs), number of sites, site size, site location in relation to vegetation zones, and/or distance between small sites and large sites. To achieve this objective we grouped the small sites according to (i) the two major modern vegetation zones of the study region, and (ii) the distance between the small sites and large lakes, i.e. small sites within 50, 100, 150, or 200 km of the large lakes. The REVEALS-based reconstructions were performed using 24 pollen taxa. Redundancy analysis was performed on the results from all REVEALS-model runs using the groups within (i) and (ii) separately, and on the results from all runs using the groups within (ii) together. The explanatory power and significance of the variables were identified using forward selection and Monte Carlo permutation tests. The results show that (a) although the REVEALS model was designed for pollen data from large lakes, it also performs well with pollen data from multiple small sites in reconstructing the percentage cover of groups of plant taxa (e.g. open land taxa, summer-green trees, evergreen trees) or individual plant taxa; however, in the case of this study area, the reconstruction of the percentage cover of Calluna vulgaris, Cyperaceae, and Betula may be problematic when using small bogs; (b) standard errors of multiple small-site REVEALS estimates will generally be larger than those obtained using pollen records from large lakes, and they will decrease with increasing size of pollen counts and increasing number of small sites; (c) small lakes are better to use than small bogs if the total number of small sites is low; and (d) the size of small sites and the distance between them do not play a major role, but the distance between the small sites and landscape/vegetation boundaries is a determinant factor for the accuracy of the vegetation reconstructions.

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“…) (pollen records from small forest hollows), in Denmark (Nielsen and Odgaard ; Overballe‐Petersen et al. ), and in southern Sweden (Fredh ; Mazier et al in press). These tests suggest that the REVEALS model and LRA approach are robust methods to infer regional and local vegetation cover using pollen records from large and small sites, respectively.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Historical land‐use and landscape change in southern Sweden and implications for present and future biodiversity

Cui

Gaillard

Lemdahl

et al. 2014

Ecology and Evolution

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The two major aims of this study are (1) To test the performance of the Landscape Reconstruction Algorithm (LRA) to quantify past landscape changes using historical maps and related written sources, and (2) to use the LRA and map reconstructions for a better understanding of the origin of landscape diversity and the recent loss of species diversity. Southern Sweden, hemiboreal vegetation zone. The LRA was applied on pollen records from three small bogs for four time windows between AD 1700 and 2010. The LRA estimates of % cover for woodland/forest, grassland, wetland, and cultivated land were compared with those extracted from historical maps within 3-km radius around each bog. Map-extracted land-use categories and pollen-based LRA estimates (in % cover) of the same land-use categories show a reasonable agreement in several cases; when they do not agree, the assumptions used in the data (maps)-model (LRA) comparison are a better explanation of the discrepancies between the two than possible biases of the LRA modeling approach. Both the LRA reconstructions and the historical maps reveal between-site differences in landscape characteristics through time, but they demonstrate comparable, profound transformations of the regional and local landscapes over time and space due to the agrarian reforms in southern Sweden during the 18th and 19th centuries. The LRA was found to be the most reasonable approach so far to reconstruct quantitatively past landscape changes from fossil pollen data. The existing landscape diversity in the region at the beginning of the 18th century had its origin in the long-term regional and local vegetation and land-use history over millennia. Agrarian reforms since the 18th century resulted in a dramatic loss of landscape diversity and evenness in both time and space over the last two centuries leading to a similarly dramatic loss of species (e.g., beetles).

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Two hundred years of land-use change in the South Swedish Uplands: comparison of historical map-based estimates with a pollen-based reconstruction using the landscape reconstruction algorithm

Cited by 56 publications

References 44 publications

Patterns of modern pollen and plant richness across northern Europe

Patterns of modern pollen and plant richness across northern Europe

Are pollen records from small sites appropriate for REVEALS model-based quantitative reconstructions of past regional vegetation? An empirical test in southern Sweden

Historical land‐use and landscape change in southern Sweden and implications for present and future biodiversity

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