Pollen and plant diversity relationships in a Mediterranean montane area
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Pollen and plant diversity relationships in a Mediterranean montane area Simon E. Connor1 · Jacqueline F. N. van Leeuwen2 · W. O. (Pim) van der Knaap2 · Rufus B. Akindola3 · Matthew A. Adeleye1 · Michela Mariani4,1 Received: 21 April 2020 / Accepted: 29 October 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Understanding the significance of pollen diversity is key to reconstructing plant diversity over long timescales. Here we present quantitative pollen-plant diversity comparisons for a mountainous area of the Western Mediterranean region. Samples were collected between 430–1,865 m elevation and pollen-plant diversity assessed through richness and turnover (beta-diversity) metrics. We found statistically significant relationships between pollen diversity metrics and the diversity of pollen-equivalent plant taxa in the surrounding vegetation. The strongest richness relationships emerged from the exclusion of trees and with standardisation of the sample size (rarefaction) applied to both plant and pollen datasets. Three different metrics for turnover produced similar results, but emphasise different components of beta diversity (replacement vs richness differences). These results pave the way for reconstructing biodiversity trends from pollen sequences, with a number of caveats. Fossil pollen is a potentially rich source of information on past biodiversity in the Mediterranean region. Keywords Plant diversity · Mediterranean · Palynological richness · Turnover · Vegetation
Introduction Biodiversity is key to the stability, functioning and productivity of ecosystems (Cardinale et al. 2012). On a global scale, biodiversity is unevenly distributed, with the greatest Communicated by T. Giesecke. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-020-00811-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Simon E. Connor [email protected] 1
Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity & Heritage, and School of Culture, History & Language, Australian National University, 9 Fellows Road, Canberra ACT‑2601, Australia
2
Institute for Plant Sciences and Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, Altenbergrain 21, 3013 Bern, Switzerland
3
Faculty of Social Sciences, Federal University Oye-Ekiti, Oye‑Are Road, Ikole, Ekiti, Nigeria
4
School of Geography, University of Nottingham, Sir Clive Granger Building, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK
diversity in equatorial regions and the least at high latitudes (Kreft and Jetz 2007; Kraft et al. 2011; Jenkins et al. 2013). This global biodiversity gradient is linked to resource availability, competition and the history of past climatic changes (Mittelbach et al. 2007; Rabosky and Hurlbert 2015; Grace et al. 2016). Climate warming in the coming decades is expected to force species to migrate poleward, altering the diversity gradient (Parmesan and Yohe 2003). However, the last major climatic warming 12–10,000 years ago
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