Later Holocene vegetation history of the Isles of Scilly, UK: coastal influence and human land use in a small island context

Pérez, Manuel Rodríguez; Fyfe, Ralph; Charman, Dan J.; Gehrels, W. Roland

doi:10.1002/jqs.2810

Cited by 9 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 46 publications

(51 reference statements)

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“…In general terms, the 'Associations' between many of the herbaceous taxa regarded as anthropogenic indicators (e.g., Apiaceae, Solidago virgaurea-type, Cirsium-type) and in situ plant presence in the open fen communities confirms the dangers of assuming that herbaceous pollen types in fen peat sequences originate from dry land environments as has often been inferred in palaeoecological investigations (see Waller, 1993;Waller, et al, 1999;Perez et al, 2015). In particular, the presence of 'cereal' pollen has been widely used as evidence to support an interpretation of dry land clearance for agriculture.…”

Section: What Influence Does the Loss Of Taxonomic Precision In Pollementioning

confidence: 82%

Disentangling the pollen signal from fen systems: Modern and Holocene studies from southern and eastern England

Waller

Carvalho

Grant

et al. 2017

Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology

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Thick deposits of peat derived from fen environments accumulated in the coastal lowland areas adjacent to the North Sea during the middle and late Holocene. These sediments are frequently used in pollen-based reconstructions of in situ and more distant vegetation. However, discriminating between wetland and dry land originating pollen signals, and between the potential fen communities present in the wetland, is complex. In this study, a suite of analytical approaches are used to explore the pollen signal of modern fen communities and compare them against Holocene pollen assemblages. At two sites in eastern England, Woodwalton Fen and Upton Broad, vegetation composition was recorded around a series of moss polster sampling points. The communities investigated included herbaceous fen communities under different cutting regimes, a grazed area, glades, and woodland with canopies dominated by Alnus glutinosa and Betula. Cluster analysis is used to provide an overview of, and compare the structure within, the datasets consisting of the vegetation, the vegetation converted to palynological equivalents, and the pollen data. It is demonstrated that any loss of taxonomic precision in pollen identifications does not pose particular problems when attempting to identify fen communities, including tall-herbaceous vegetation, in the pollen record. Indices of Association imply pollen presence can be interpreted as indicating the local presence for some taxa, though few of these are confined to a particular community. Herbaceous fen vegetation subject to different management regimes are, however, shown to produce distinctive pollen signatures. Middle and late Holocene pollen assemblages from eastern (Fenland) and southern (Romney Marsh) England, interpreted as derived from fen vegetation, are compared against the modern pollen dataset using ordination. Most of the fossil samples plot out within or adjacent to the groupings produced by the modern samples in the ordinations. While these investigations demonstrate that modern pollen work can help improve the interpretation of Holocene assemblages they also call attention to a number of limitations including the restricted range of communities from which modern samples are currently available and the potential for non-analogous modern vegetation. The paper concludes with ideas to aid the interpretation of pollen data collected from fen peats and suggestions for future work.

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Section: What Influence Does the Loss Of Taxonomic Precision In Pollementioning

confidence: 82%

Disentangling the pollen signal from fen systems: Modern and Holocene studies from southern and eastern England

Waller

Carvalho

Grant

et al. 2017

Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology

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“…yr. BP; however, as previously mentioned, major landscape alterations as a result of human activity are typically not detectable until the later Holocene in Anatolia. Cluster analysis and community classification, which involved calculating the median and interquartile range of all pollen taxa within samples that fall into each cluster group (Perez et al, 2015) were used to identify major vegetation groups in Mediterranean-wide modern and fossil pollen datasets (Davis et al, 2013;Leydet et al, 2007Leydet et al, -2017. This paper focuses on a sub-set of these sites from Anatolia for continuous 200-year time windows throughout the Holocene.…”

Section: Pollen-inferred Vegetation Changementioning

confidence: 99%

Pollen-inferred regional vegetation patterns and demographic change in Southern Anatolia through the Holocene

et al. 2019

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Southern Anatolia is a highly significant area within the Mediterranean, particularly in terms of understanding how agriculture moved into Europe from neighbouring regions. This study uses pollen, palaeoclimate and archaeological evidence to investigate the relationships between demography and vegetation change, and to explore how the development of agriculture varied spatially. Data from 21 fossil pollen records have been transformed into forested, parkland and open vegetation types using cluster analysis. Patterns of change have been explored using non-metric multidimensional scaling (nMDS) and through analysis of indicator groups, such as an Anthropogenic Pollen Index, and Simpson's Diversity. Settlement data, which indicate population densities, and summed radiocarbon dates for archaeological sites have been used as a proxy for demographic change. The pollen and archaeological records confirm that farming can be detected earlier (around 7000 cal. yr. BP) in Anatolia in comparison with other parts of the Mediterranean. Dynamics of change in grazing indicators and the OJCV (Olea, Juglans, Castanea, and Vitis) index for cultivated trees appear to match cycles of population expansion and decline. Vegetation and land use change is also influenced by other factors, such as climate change. Investigating the early impacts of anthropogenic activities (e.g. woodcutting, animal herding, the use of fire and agriculture) is key to understanding how societies have modified the environment since the mid-late Holocene, despite the capacity of ecological systems to absorb recurrent disturbances. The results of this study suggest that shifting human population dynamics played an important role in shaping land cover in central and southern Anatolia.

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“…The pollen cluster groups have also been compared against land cover and land use types defined by the Corine (COoRdination of INformation on the Environment) remotely sensed land‐cover maps (European Environment Agency (EEA), ) and the results of previous studies (Huntley, ; Peyron et al., ; Prentice et al., ). An individual taxon's frequency is determined by calculating its number of occurrences divided by the number of samples in the cluster and assigning one of five frequency classes based on cut‐off values between each group, which follows the method used by Perez, Fyfe, Charman, and Gehrels (). If a taxon appears in 81%–100% of all samples in the cluster group, it is assigned the highest frequency class.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pan‐Mediterranean Holocene vegetation and land‐cover dynamics from synthesized pollen data

Woodbridge

Roberts

Fyfe

2018

Journal of Biogeography

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Aim: The Mediterranean is characterized by diverse and spatially heterogeneous mosaic landscapes. Within this study, a cluster analysis-based method is developed for the classification of Mediterranean vegetation types based on modern and fossil pollen datasets. The application of this approach to multiple pollen records spanning the Mediterranean region has allowed temporal variations in vegetation dynamics to be explored throughout the Holocene. We ask how far back stable baseline vegetation communities can be identified in the pollen record, and whether those types considered to be characteristic of the Mediterranean landscapes have been present in the past as well as at the present. Location: The research location includes the land areas surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. The pollen sites are principally located in mainland Spain, southern France, Greece and Turkey, Italy, North Africa, the Levant, and some Mediterranean islands. Methods: A total of 5,641 samples from 158 fossil pollen records (cores) and 1,799 modern pollen surface samples were harmonized taxonomically and pollen count data summed into 200-year time windows on a common time-scale from 11,000 BP to the present-day. Cluster analysis and community classification were used to identify major vegetation types along with other approaches to explore patterns in ecological datasets, such as Simpson's diversity index and nonmetric multidimensional scaling. Results: The pollen datasets were classified into 11 closed forest/woodland and five open or scrubland vegetation types. Closed vegetation clusters declined from the mid-Holocene with a marked increase in open or human-modified vegetation types since 3,500 BP and with an increasing rate of vegetation change and habitat diversity through time. Main conclusions: The Mediterranean has been a dynamic landscape throughout the Holocene with frequent changes in land cover identified in the pollen datasets.The pollen-inferred clusters reveal a wider range of Mediterranean vegetation types than identified in previous studies; for example, including both beech and alder woods. Evergreen Oleaceae-dominated shrubland is much better represented in modern than in fossil samples while mesic forest was abundant in the past but is uncommon today. K E Y W O R D Sdisturbance, Holocene, human impacts, land cover, landscape structure, mediterranean, pollen, vegetation

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Later Holocene vegetation history of the Isles of Scilly, UK: coastal influence and human land use in a small island context

Cited by 9 publications

References 46 publications

Disentangling the pollen signal from fen systems: Modern and Holocene studies from southern and eastern England

Disentangling the pollen signal from fen systems: Modern and Holocene studies from southern and eastern England

Pollen-inferred regional vegetation patterns and demographic change in Southern Anatolia through the Holocene

Pan‐Mediterranean Holocene vegetation and land‐cover dynamics from synthesized pollen data

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