Vegetation development and correlation of Holocene events in the Amur River basin, NE Eurasia

A late Holocene record of vegetation and fire from the Amur Basin, far-eastern Russia

“…The previous works of longer records in the Russian Far East indicate that the maximum development of deciduous broadleaved forest occurred during wettest and warmest conditions of the mid Holocene, about 8000 to 4500 cal BP (Bazarova et al, 2008b(Bazarova et al, , 2011a(Bazarova et al, , 2011b. A quantitative biome reconstruction using modern and late Quaternary pollen data from the southern part of the Russian Far East demonstrated that the scores of temperate deciduous forest are high between 10.3 and 2.5 ka and become distinctly lower with a tendency to change to those of cool mixed forest during the late Holocene (Mokhova et al, 2009).…”

“…The pattern of precipitation change is more difficult to determine than that of temperature from major dryland taxa and there may be regional differences in direction and synchroneity in humidity variation (Bazarova et al, 2011b), but there is a general positive relationship between the two climatic parameters with an overall decreasing trend from the mid-Holocene to around 250 years BP (Klimenko et al, 2000).…”

“…Both fossil and modem studies indicate that past and present vegetation responds to changes in both temperature and effective moisture. In recent years, some pollen records from the Sea of Okhotsk region, such as the Kamchatka Peninsula (Dirksen et al, 2013), Sakhalin, Primorye and Kuril islands (Korotky et al, 1997(Korotky et al, , 2000Bazarova et al, 2008a;Razzhigaeva et al, 2008Razzhigaeva et al, , 2009Razzhigaeva et al, , 2013 have been produced, while a long pollen record from Lake Baikal has revealed a broad regional picture of high latitude vegetation and climate changes (Bezrukova et al, 2005;Bazarova et al, 2011b). However, the lower basin wetlands of the AmurHeilong River have tended to be relatively poorly studies despite possessing thick Holocene peats that have great potential for paleoenvironmental reconstruction as well as assessment of human activities and recent climate change (Lozhkin et al, 2011).…”

Neolithic and Aeneolithic Environments in the Central Primor'ye Region (the Bol'shaya Ussurka Valley), the Russian Far East

“…On the other hand, these minor variations may be due to the different methods applied for our percentage calculation in the SIM sequence and in those presented by Verkhovskaya et al (1994). An expansion of Betula was also detected in the uppermost parts of documented pollen profiles (the Subatlantic chronozone) from the lower Amur Basin (Bazarova et al, 2011). In this case, this late Holocene climate cooling is considered as the main driver for these environmental changes (Mokhova et al, 2009;Bazarova et al, 2011), but also with likely feedback from the modern cultural landscape development.…”

“…The principal palynological reference profiles for the southern Russian Far East come from lakes, peat bogs or surficial exposures (e.g. Korotky et al, 1980;Korotky, 2002;Bazarova et al, 2008Bazarova et al, , 2011. The first two types of sites document regional and regional/local changes (Jacobson and Bradshow, 1981), whereas samples collected from human settlements primarily contain information about past processes from a spatially limited nearby occupation area.…”