Vegetation and Environment History for the Past 14 000 yr BP from Dingnan, Jiangxi Province, South China

A Late Pleistocene-Holocene pollen, phosphorus, and charcoal record was reconstructed from a peatland in southern Jiangxi Province in southern China. The area today has a mountainous and rolling landscape with villages, small towns, and agriculture dominated by rice paddies, vegetable, and fruit gardens, as well as areas of secondary forest and pine re-afforestation. The record opens before 14 300 yr BP, with Alnus woodland dominating the wetland areas and with an open Quercus woodland on the surrounding slopes. The forest area becomes more complex from approximately 12 800 yr BP and further from 9 000 yr BP. At approximately 6 000 yr BP, there is evidence of clearing and, by 4 500-4 000 yr BP, a complete collapse in the wetland Alnus and terrestrial forest as the low-lying areas are converted to rice production. For much of the record, the occurrence of fire around the site was low, although there is evidence of regional fires. Fire was used as a tool in clearing and then used in the annual cycles of stubble burning after rice harvest. Nutrient levels, as reflected by total phosphorus in the sediment, seem to be closely related to forest changes and high values in the surface layers probably result from land-management techniques associated with agriculture. Therefore, human impact greatly altered forest cover, fire frequency, and nutrient dynamics; this has been evident for approximately 6 000 yr BP and then intensities towards the present day.

Exploring seven hundred years of transhumance, climate dynamic, fire and human activity through a historical mountain pass in central Spain

A high-altitude peat sequence from the heart of the Spanish Central System(Gredos range) was analysed through a multi-proxy approach to determine the sensitivity of high-mountain habitats to climate, fire and land use changes during the last seven hundred years, providing valuable insight into our understanding of the vegetation history and environmental changes in a mountain pass close to a traditional route of transhumance. The pollen data indicate that the vegetation was dominated by shrublands and grasslands with scattered pines in high-mountain areas, while in the valleys cereals, chestnut and olive trees were cultivated. Strong declines of high-mountain pines percentages are recorded at 1540, 1675, 1765, 1835 and 1925 cal AD, which may be related to increasing grazing activities and/or the occurrence of anthropogenic fires. The practice of mountain summer farming and transhumance deeply changed and redesigned the landscape of the high altitudes in central Spain(Gredos range) since the Middle Ages, although its dynamics was influenced in some way by climate variability of the past seven centuries.

Complementarity of lacustrine pollen and sedimentary DNA in representing vegetation on the central-eastern Tibetan Plateau

Plant environmental DNA extracted from lacustrine sediments(sedimentary DNA,sedDNA)has been increasingly used to investigate past vegetation changes and human impacts at a high taxonomic resolution.However,the representation of vegetation communities surrounding the lake is still unclear.In this study,we compared plant sedDNA metabarcoding and pollen assemblages from 27 lake surface-sediment samples collected from alpine meadow on the central-eastern Tibetan Plateau to investigate the representation of sedDNA data.In general,the identified components of sedDNA are consistent with the counted pollen taxa and local plant communities.Relative to pollen identification,sedDNA data have higher taxonomic resolution,thus providing a potential approach for reconstructing past plant diversity.The sedDNA signal is strongly influenced by local plants while rarely affected by exogenous plants.Because of the overrepresentation of local plants and PCR bias,the abundance of sedDNA sequence types is very variable among sites,and should be treated with caution when investigating past vegetation cover and climate based on sedDNA data.Our finding suggests that sedDNA analysis can be a complementary approach for investigating the presence/absence of past plants and history of human land-use with higher taxonomic resolution.