The Holocene January 2016 vol. 26 no. 1 80-92
- Ambroise G Baker1,2
- Marcelina Zimny3
- Andrzej Keczyński4
- Shonil A Bhagwat5,6
- Kathy J Willis1,7
- Małgorzata Latałowa3⇑
- 1Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, UK
- 2Environmental Change Research Centre, Department of Geography, University College London, UK
- 3Laboratory of Palaeoecology and Archaeobotany, Department of Plant Ecology, University of Gdańsk, Poland
- 4Białowieża National Park, Poland
- 5Department of Geography, The Open University, UK
- 6School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, UK
- 7Department of Biology, University of Bergen, Norway
- Ambroise G Baker, Environmental Change Research Centre, Department of Geography, University College London, Pearson Building, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK. Email: ambroise.baker@ucl.ac.uk
- Małgorzata Latałowa, Laboratory of Palaeoecology and Archaeobotany, Department of Plant Ecology, University of Gdańsk, ul. Wita Stwosza 59, 80-308 Gdańsk, Poland. Email: malgorzata.latalowa@biol.ug.edu.pl
Abstract
Pollen productivity estimates of
individual plant taxa are necessary when determining changes of
vegetation cover during the
Holocene. To date, studies describing this
parameter in lowland temperate Europe have been carried out in cultural
landscapes
showing low forest cover and dominated by human
activities. However, these may be of limited use when applied to
reconstruct
past land cover, for instance, from
pre-agricultural landscapes. The aim of this paper is to ascertain
whether pollen productivity
from the closed-canopy old-growth forest in the
Białowieża National Park, Poland, where human impact has been minimal
for
nearly a century, is different from that calculated
in much more open landscapes. We ask: how much does forest antiquity
and
structure influence the amount of pollen released
from particular taxa? We implemented maximum likelihood estimation of
relative
pollen productivity for seven tree species and for Poaceae using 18 modern pollen assemblages and distance-weighted plant abundances. Our results demonstrate that the ratio of pollen
productivity between high producers (Pinus sylvestris and Quercus robur) and low producers (Poaceae, Corylus avellana) is on an average six times greater in Białowieża than across other European cultural landscapes. Pollen from forest Poaceae and C. avellana
is six times more under-represented in old-growth forest than hitherto
estimated from cultural landscapes. This finding reinforces
the idea that pollen productivity can vary in
response to changes in the prevailing environmental settings and we
present
for the first time a quantification of this
variability, likely induced by differences in light availability.
- canopy structure
- ERV-models
- landscape openness
- moss polsters
- old-growth forest
- relative pollen productivity
- Received November 16, 2014.
- Accepted June 3, 2015.