Pollen‐based reconstructions of biome distributions for Australia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific (SEAPAC region) at 0, 6000 and 18,000¹⁴C yr BP

Abstract

Aim This paper documents reconstructions of the vegetation patterns in Australia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific (SEAPAC region) in the midHolocene and at the last glacial maximum (LGM).

Impacts of land surface properties and atmospheric CO<sub>2</sub> on the Last Glacial Maximum climate: a factor separation analysis

“…Regionally, the simulated LGM vegetation distribution is broadly consistent with the results of the Palaeovegetation Mapping Project BIOME 6000 1 (Prentice and Jolly, 2000;Harrison et al, 2001;Bigelow et al, 2003;Pickett et al, 2004). Polar desert and tundra are modelled in a large part of the Northern Hemisphere continents.…”

“…The vegetation distributions for the preindustrial and the LGM were obtained with the dynamic vegetation model CARAIB. They compare fairly well in terms of biomes with the results of the Palaeovegetation Mapping Project BIOME6000 (Prentice and Jolly, 2000).…”

“…We have restricted our comparison to the continental areas in order to limit the oceanic influence, since our model does not include an OGCM. The Wu et al (2007) reconstruction was produced with an improved inverse vegetation model, using a recent version of BIOME4 (Kaplan, 2001) and pollen biome scores from the BIOME6000 project (Prentice and Jolly, 2000). Further, the improved inverse modelling method takes into account the direct physiological impact of the lower CO 2 concentration at LGM, reducing the bias in palaeoclimatic reconstruction .…”

Modern surface pollen from the Torres Strait islands: Exploring north Australian vegetation heterogeneity

“…To quote Kershaw (2007:2), 'pollen analysis on the sclerophyll side of the rainforest boundary has so far proved elusive'. This 'elusiveness' hampers progress in our understanding of Quaternary vegetation-type dynamics, counteracts the up-to-date design and testing of climatic-vegetation models (Harrison et al 2007;Lynch et al 2007) of proxy database development/comprehensiveness (Pickett et al 2004), limits conceptualisations of human-environment interactions and relations (Denham and Mooney 2008), and provides less long-term ecological information relevant to conservationists and land managers (Froyd and Willis 2008).…”

Climate, not Aboriginal landscape burning, controlled the historical demography and distribution of fire-sensitive conifer populations across Australia

“…Most palaeoproxies representing vegetation and fire regime changes in the last glacial period have come from the temperate or tropical fringes of the continent [10,17], where sedimentary cores are relatively well preserved. In the humid tropics, during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM; ca 20 kya) there was a reduction in rainforest angiosperms and a transition to sclerophyllous woodland, possibly caused by reduced rainfall and accelerated by Aboriginal burning [18].…”