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The Black Sea catchment (BSC) is facing important demographic, climatic and landuse changes that may increase pollution, vulnerability and scarcity of water resources, as well as beach erosion through sea level rise. Limited access to reliable time-series monitoring data from environmental, statistical, and socio-economical sources is a major barrier to policy development and decision-making. To address these issues, a web-based platform was developed to enable discovery and access to key environmental information for the region. This platform covers: landuse, climate, and demographic scenarios; hydrology and related water vulnerability and scarcity; as well as beach erosion. Each data set has been obtained with state-of-the-art modelling tools from available monitoring data using appropriate validation methods. These analyses were conducted using global and regional data sets. The data sets are intended for national to regional assessments, for instance for prioritizing environmental protection projects and investments. Together they form a unique set of information, which lay out future plausible change scenarios for the BSC, both for scientific and policy purposes.

Abstract. Pollen data represents one of the most widely available and spatially-resolved sources of information about the past land cover and climate of the Last Glacial Maximum (21,000 years BP). Previous pollen data compilations for Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East however have been limited by small numbers of sites and poor dating control. Here we present a new compilation of pollen data from the region that improves on both the number of sites (63) and the quality of the chronological control. Data has been sourced from both public data archives and published (digitized) diagrams. Analysis is presented based on a standardized pollen taxonomy and sum, with maps shown for the major pollen taxa, biomes and total arboreal pollen, as well as quantitative reconstructions of forest cover and winter, summer and annual temperatures and precipitation. The reconstructions are based on the modern analogue technique (MAT) with a modern calibration dataset taken from the latest Eurasian Modern Pollen Database (~8000 samples). A site-by-site comparison of MAT and Inverse Modelling methods shows little or no significant difference between the methods for the LGM, indicating that no-modern-analogue and low CO2 conditions during the LGM do not appear to have had a major effect on MAT transfer function performance. Previous pollen-based climate reconstructions based on MAT show a much colder and drier climate for the LGM than both Inverse Modelling and climate model simulations, but our new results suggest much greater agreement. Differences between our latest MAT reconstruction and those in earlier studies can be largely attributed to bias in the small modern calibration dataset previously used. We also find that quantitative forest cover reconstructions show more forest than that previously suggested by biome reconstructions, but less forest than that suggested by simple percentage arboreal pollen, although uncertainties remain large. Overall, we find that LGM climatic cooling/drying was significantly greater in winter than in summer, but with large site to site variance that emphasizes the importance of topography and other local factors in controlling the climate and vegetation of the LGM.

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