Topic III - Environmental issues > III-9-Pollen-based land cover reconstruction to study climate and human impact on vegetation, terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems

Conveners

1. Florence Mazier (GEODE, CNRS, University of Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, Toulouse, France)
2. Laurent Marquer (Department of Botany, University of Innsbruck, Austria)
3. Andréa Julien (GEODE, CNRS, University of Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, Toulouse, France)
   
4. Erwan Messager (EDYTEM, CNRS, Université Savoie Mont-Blanc, Le Bourget-du-Lac, France) 

The combination of climate variations and human activities, especially agro-pastoral practices, have significantly influenced terrestrial and aquatic environments, over time. Changes in climate (e.g. humidity, temperature, seasonality) and land use (e.g. deforestation, agriculture, fire) have accelerated soil erosion and altered socio-ecosystems by disrupting vegetation and ecological balance. Pollen assemblages from lake and bog sediments are valuable proxies for assessing past vegetation. Advanced pollen-based modeling techniques now correct biases in inter-taxonomic differences in pollen production and dispersal, enabling more accurate reconstructions of past vegetation and land cover at regional to local scales. These reconstructions, combined with other proxies (e.g. spores of coprophilous fungi, NPP, charcoal, environmental DNA, GDGTs), offer valuable insights into how climate and land use have shaped landscapes and influenced environmental processes over time.

This session will explore pollen/NPP-based analyses for examining long-term changes in land cover, with an emphasis on the interactions between climate/human activities and shifts in past vegetation and land cover. Studies that focus on spatially explicit reconstructions of past land cover are encouraged. Approaches that investigate the relationship between changes in vegetation, climate, land cover, and their impacts on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, as well as erosion dynamics, are also welcome.