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Biome changes and their inferred climatic drivers in northern and eastern continental Asia at selected times since 40 cal ka bp

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Abstract

Recent global warming is pronounced in high-latitude regions (e.g. northern Asia), and will cause the vegetation to change. Future vegetation trends (e.g. the “arctic greening”) will feed back into atmospheric circulation and the global climate system. Understanding the nature and causes of past vegetation changes is important for predicting the composition and distribution of future vegetation communities. Fossil pollen records from 468 sites in northern and eastern Asia were biomised at selected times between 40 cal ka bp and today. Biomes were also simulated using a climate-driven biome model and results from the two approaches compared in order to help understand the mechanisms behind the observed vegetation changes. The consistent biome results inferred by both approaches reveal that long-term and broad-scale vegetation patterns reflect global- to hemispheric-scale climate changes. Forest biomes increase around the beginning of the late deglaciation, become more widespread during the early and middle Holocene, and decrease in the late Holocene in fringe areas of the Asian Summer Monsoon. At the southern and southwestern margins of the taiga, forest increases in the early Holocene and shows notable species succession, which may have been caused by winter warming at ca. 7 cal ka bp. At the northeastern taiga margin (central Yakutia and northeastern Siberia), shrub expansion during the last deglaciation appears to prevent the permafrost from thawing and hinders the northward expansion of evergreen needle-leaved species until ca. 7 cal ka bp. The vegetation-climate disequilibrium during the early Holocene in the taiga-tundra transition zone suggests that projected climate warming will not cause a northward expansion of evergreen needle-leaved species.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their gratitude to all the palynologists who, either directly or indirectly, contributed their pollen records to the pollen dataset. This research was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and PalMod project (BMBF). Jian Ni was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2016YFC0502101). The work of Andrei Andreev was also partly performed under the Russian Government Program of Competitive Growth of Kazan Federal University. The work of Natalia Rudaya was founded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Ref 3.3-RUS-1151158-HFST-E); Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, Project no. 14.Z50.31.0010 of the Altai State University; Russian Government Program of Competitive Growth of Kazan Federal University; and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR), Grant no. 16-55-44065. Additional support was provided to Anatoly Lozhkin by the Russian Foundation for Fundamental Research (15-05-06420) and Russian Academy of Sciences, Far East Branch (15-I-2-067). Cathy Jenks provided help with language editing.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Unit Potsdam, Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Telegrafenberg A43, 14473, Potsdam, Germany

    Fang Tian, Xianyong Cao & Ulrike Herzschuh

  2. Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, KlimaCampus, Bundesstraße 53, 20146, Hamburg, Germany

    Fang Tian & Anne Dallmeyer

  3. Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Am Handelshafen 12, 27570, Bremerhaven, Germany

    Gerrit Lohmann & Xu Zhang

  4. MARUM-Center for Marine Environmental Sciences, University of Bremen, Leobener Straße 8, 28359, Bremen, Germany

    Gerrit Lohmann

  5. College of Chemistry and Life Sciences, Zhejiang Normal University, Yingbin Avenue 688, Jinhua, 321004, China

    Jian Ni

  6. Institute of Geology and Mineralogy, University of Cologne, Zülpicher Straße 49a, 50674, Cologne, Germany

    Andrei Andreev

  7. Institute of Geology and Petroleum Technologies, Kazan Federal University, Kazan, 420008, Russia

    Andrei Andreev & Natalia Rudaya

  8. Earth and Space Sciences and Quaternary Research Center, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98185, USA

    Patricia M. Anderson

  9. North East Interdisciplinary Science Research Institute, Far East Branch Russian Academy of Sciences, Magadan, 685000, Russia

    Anatoly V. Lozhkin

  10. Vinogradov Institute of Geochemistry, Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences, ul. Favorskogo 1a, Irkutsk, 664033, Russia

    Elena Bezrukova

  11. Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences, pr. Akad. Lavrentieva 17, Novosibirsk, 630090, Russia

    Elena Bezrukova & Natalia Rudaya

  12. Department of Archaeology and Ethnography, Novosibirsk State University, Pirogova 2, Novosibirsk, 630090, Russia

    Natalia Rudaya

  13. Department of Archaeology and Ethnography, Altai State University, Str. Lenina, 61, Barnaul, 656049, Russia

    Natalia Rudaya

  14. College of Resources and Environment Sciences, Hebei Normal University, Shijiazhuang, 050024, China

    Qinghai Xu

  15. Institute of Earth and Environment Science, University of Potsdam, Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 24, 14476, Potsdam, Germany

    Ulrike Herzschuh

  16. Institute of Biochemistry and Biology, University of Potsdam, Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 24, 14476, Potsdam, Germany

    Ulrike Herzschuh

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  1. Fang Tian
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  2. Xianyong Cao
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  3. Anne Dallmeyer
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Correspondence to Fang Tian.

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Communicated by F. Bittmann.

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Tian, F., Cao, X., Dallmeyer, A. et al. Biome changes and their inferred climatic drivers in northern and eastern continental Asia at selected times since 40 cal ka bp . Veget Hist Archaeobot 27, 365–379 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-017-0653-8

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