Holocene

Summary

The Holocene (ˈhɒl.əsiːn,_-oʊ-,ˈhoʊ.lə-,-loʊ-) is the current geological epoch. It began approximately 11,700 years before 2000 CE (11,650 cal years BP, 9700 BCE or 300 HE). It follows the Last Glacial Period, which concluded with the Holocene glacial retreat. The Holocene and the preceding Pleistocene together form the Quaternary period. The Holocene has been identified with the current warm period, known as MIS 1. It is considered by some to be an interglacial period within the Pleistocene Epoch, called the Flandrian interglacial. The Holocene corresponds with the rapid proliferation, growth and impacts of the human species worldwide, including all of its written history, technological revolutions, development of major civilizations, and overall significant transition towards urban living in the present. The human impact on modern-era Earth and its ecosystems may be considered of global significance for the future evolution of living species, including approximately synchronous

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene

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Drivers of Holocene Land Cover Change in Europe

Pamela Collins

The modern vegetation of Europe is a product of its history. Climate change, plant migration, and human activity have all been important drivers of Holocene (11,500 years ago to the present) vegetation dynamics, but it is difficult to disentangle the relative importance of the three processes. This thesis uses a vegetation model and land cover reconstructions based on pollen data to explore the drivers of European vegetation change. I conclude that human activity has likely been an important driver for many millennia, both through disturbing the vegetated landscape and possibly also through causing soil erosion in drought-sensitive areas, but that post-glacial migration is likely also an important factor. In the face of future climate change and intensifying human land use, it will be necessary to incorporate these results into landscape management and conservation planning.

EPFL2013

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The circum-Mediterranean region is characterized by a strongly seasonal climate with rainy winters and intense summertime drought, steep topography, and a multi-millennial history of intensive human land use, all of which make its soils vulnerable to erosion. The historical and stratigraphic record documents severe and long-term soil erosion in several locations in the Mediterranean. A forest-to-scrub transition in Mediterranean vegetation between the mid-Holocene (6,000 yr BP) and the present is evident in the observational palaeorecord. Debate as to the causes of this shift is ongoing. This study seeks to test the sensitivity of large-scale vegetation patterns to changes in soil physical properties such as depth, content of coarse fragments, and organic matter content using the Mediterranean region as a case study. We find that simulated biomes are sensitive to changes in some soil physical properties at some locations, but that threshold values for soil change to affect vegetation are very high. Additional work is required to analyze the role that other soil physical properties, and climate change, played in influencing Holocene land cover change in the Mediterranean, and to improve model representations of relevant processes.

2010

The climate of Europe during the Holocene: a gridded pollen-based reconstruction and its multi-proxy evaluation

Pamela Collins, Basil Andrew Stansfield Davis, Jed Oliver Kaplan

We present a new gridded climate reconstruction for Europe for the last 12,000 years based on pollen data. The reconstruction is an update of Davis et al. (2003) using the same methodology, but with a greatly expanded fossil and surface-sample dataset and more rigorous quality-control. The modern pollen dataset has been increased by more than 80%, and the fossil pollen dataset by more than 50%, representing almost 60,000 individual pollen samples. The climate parameters reconstructed include summer/winter and annual temperatures and precipitation, as well as a measure of moisture balance, and growing degree-days above 5 degrees C. Confidence limits were established for the reconstruction based on transfer function and interpolation uncertainties. The reconstruction takes account of post-glacial isostatic readjustment which resulted in a potential warming bias of up to +1-2 degrees C for parts of Fennoscandia in the early Holocene, as well as changes in palaeogeography resulting from decaying ice sheets and rising post-glacial sea-levels. This new dataset has been evaluated against previously published independent quantitative climate reconstructions from a variety of archives on a site-by-site basis across Europe. The results of this comparison are generally very good; only chironomid-based reconstructions showed substantial differences with our values. Our reconstruction is available for download as gridded maps throughout the Holocene on a 1000-year time-step. The gridded format makes our reconstructions suitable for comparison with climate model output and for other applications such as vegetation and land-use modelling. Our new climate reconstruction suggests that warming in Europe during the mid-Holocene was greater in winter than in summer, an apparent paradox that is not consistent with current climate model simulations and traditional interpretations of Milankovitch theory. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2015

The climate of Europe during the Holocene: a gridded pollen-based reconstruction and its multi-proxy evaluation

Pamela Collins, Basil Andrew Stansfield Davis, Jed Oliver Kaplan

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2015