Pollen-inferred millennial changes in landscape patterns at a
major biogeographical interface within Europe
Eva Jamrichová 1,2, Libor Petr 1, Borja Jiménez- Alfaro 1, Vlasta Jankovská 2, Lydie Dudová 2,1, Petr Pokorný 3, Piotr Kołaczek 4, Valentina Zernitskaya 5,
Malvína Čierniková6, Eva Břízová 7, Petra Hájková1,2 & Michal Hájek 1
(1) Department of Botany and Zoology, Faculty of Science, Masaryk University,
[email protected]
Brno, Czech Republic; (2) Department of Vegetation
Ecology, the Czech Academy of Science, Brno, Czech Republic; (3) Center for Theoretical Study, Charles University in Prague and the
Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague 1, Czech Republic; (4) Department of Biogeography and Paleoecology, Adam
Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poznań, Poland; (5) Institute of Nature Management, National Academy of Belarus, Minsk, Republic of
Belarus; (6) Department of Soil Science, Comenius University in Bratislava, Bratislava 4, Slovakia; (7) Czech Geological Survey, Prague 1,
Czech Republic
Introduction
Study area
Variation in past pollen spectra may reveal past differences in landscape development
and hence explain recent biogeographical patterns.
We formulated the hypothesis that the recent co-occurrence of contrasting
biogeographical elements (warm-temperate, continental, boreal, arctic-alpine) in a
region may be shaped by the distribution of their glacial or postglacial refugia.
Results
Fig. 1: Map of the Western Carpathians and adjacent regions with localization of 112 sites
involved into analysis.
Methods
We gathered past pollen spectra from 112 sites for six time-periods from the Late Glacial
to the present. Compositional patterns were assessed by Principal Coordinate Analyses.
Site PCoA scores were interpolated geographically for each period.
A six time-periods and questions behind:
Period 1 – Late Glacial (15.000-11.700 cal BP): Is there any gradient between
„temperate“ landscapes (with early presence of temperate species) and „steppetundra“ landscapes (with surviving full-glacial species)?
Period 2 – Holocene onset (11.000 – 10.000 cal BP): Is an early occurrence of temperate
trees reported by local studies a major factor diversifying the landscape?
Period 3 – Pre-Neolithic (8500 – 7500 cal BP): Did putative „steppe“ regions with recent
isolated occurrences of steppe elements) differ from other ones?
Period 4 – Late Neolithic (6500 – 5500 cal BP): How Neolithic agriculture changed
landscape structure?
Period 5 – Late prehistory (3000 – 2000 cal BP): How human penetration to high
altitudes affected landscape structure?
Period 6 – (Post)Medieval (750-250 cal BP): Does this colonisation wave indeed
altered Carpathian landscape fundamentally?
Conclusions
Past variation in pollen data suggests:
Consistently over the last 15.000 years, the first ordination axis sorted samples
according to proportion of deciduous temperate trees, while the second axis
consistently followed the temperature gradient from lowlands to high mountains.
We identified:
• humid regions with a long persistence of temperate forest species since at
least the Late Glacial,
• highland regions with a long-term persistence of boreal coniferous forests,
• regions with a continuous persistence of open lands including steppe
grasslands.
• the existence of northern glacial refugia (or at least Late-Glacial
stepping-stone populations) of temperate trees in western Slovakia,
postglacial refugia of continental steppe species in lowlands and in a
leeward mountain basin, and
• Late-Holocene refugia of spruce forests in North-Central Slovakia
formed during a spread of beech.
We conclude that past landscape diversification should be incorporated
into recent biogeographic models in order to enlarge the interpretive
context.
The present-day fine-grained mountain landscape was however formed as late as
during modern pre-industrial colonisation.
Acknowledgements: This research was funded from Czech Science Foundation (P504/11/0429); the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme
(FP7/2007-2013)/ERC Grant agreement no 278065 and by long-term research project RVO 67985939 from the CAS of the Czech Republic.