Climate of the Past
Climate of the Past
CP
Articles | Volume 19, issue 7
Articles | Volume 19, issue 7
https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-19-1531-2023
© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Special issue:
https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-19-1531-2023
© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Articles | Volume 19, issue 7
Research article
 | 
27 Jul 2023
Research article |  | 27 Jul 2023

The challenge of comparing pollen-based quantitative vegetation reconstructions with outputs from vegetation models – a European perspective

Anne Dallmeyer, Anneli Poska, Laurent Marquer, Andrea Seim, and Marie-José Gaillard

Data sets

Pollen-based REVEALS estimates of plant cover in Europe for 36 grid-cells and the last 11700 years L. Marquer, M.-J. Gaillard, S. Sugita, A. Poska, A.-K. Trondman, F. Mazier, A. B. Nielsen, R. M. Fyfe, A. M. Jönsson, B. Smith, J. O. Kaplan, T. Alenius, H. J. B. Birks, A. E. Bjune, J. Christiansen, J. Dodson, K. J. Edwards, T. Giesecke, U. Herzschuh, M. Kangur, T. Koff, M. Latalowa, J. Lechterbeck, J. Olofsson, and H. Seppä https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.900966

NOAA/WDS Paleoclimatology - Temperature 12k Database D. S. Kaufman, N. P. McKay, and C. Routson https://doi.org/10.25921/4ry2-g808

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Short summary
We compare past tree cover changes in Europe during the last 8000 years simulated with two dynamic global vegetation models and inferred from pollen data. The major model–data mismatch is related to the much earlier onset of anthropogenic deforestation in the data compared to the prescribed land use in the models. We show that land use, and not climate, is the main driver of the Holocene forest decline. The model–data agreement depends on the model tuning, challenging model–data comparisons.
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Special issue
Past vegetation dynamics and their role in past climate...