Pinus nigra (European black pine) as the dominant species of the last glacial pinewoods in south-western to central Iberia: a morphological study of modern and fossil pollen

Desprat, Stéphanie; Díaz Fernández, Pedro Manuel; Coulon, Tabatha; Ezzat, Leila; Pessarossi-Langlois, Julien; Gil, Luis; Morales del Molino, César; Sánchez Goñi, Maria Fernanda (2015). Pinus nigra (European black pine) as the dominant species of the last glacial pinewoods in south-western to central Iberia: a morphological study of modern and fossil pollen. Journal of Biogeography, 42(10), pp. 1998-2009. Wiley 10.1111/jbi.12566

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Aim
Our aim was to discriminate different species of Pinus via pollen analysis in order to assess the responses of particular pine species to orbital and millennial-scale climate changes, particularly during the last glacial period.

Location
Modern pollen grains were collected from current pine populations along transects from the Pyrenees to southern Iberia and the Balearic Islands. Fossil pine pollen was recovered from the south-western Iberian margin core MD95-2042.

Methods
We measured a set of morphological traits of modern pollen from the Iberian pine species Pinus nigra, P. sylvestris, P. halepensis, P. pinea and P. pinaster and of fossil pine pollen from selected samples of the last glacial period and the early to mid-Holocene. Classification and regression tree (CART) analysis was used to establish a model from the modern dataset that discriminates pollen from the different pine species and allows identification of fossil pine pollen at the species level.

Results
The CART model was effective in separating pollen of P. nigra and P. sylvestris from that of the Mediterranean pine group (P. halepensis, P. pinea and P. pinaster). The pollen of Pinus nigra diverged from that of P. sylvestris by having a more flattened corpus. Predictions using this model suggested that fossil pine pollen is mainly from P. nigra in all the samples analysed. Pinus sylvestris was more abundant in samples from Greenland stadials than Heinrich stadials, whereas Mediterranean pines increased in samples from Greenland interstadials and during the early to mid-Holocene.

Main conclusions
Morphological parameters can be successfully used to increase the taxonomic resolution of fossil pine pollen at the species level for the highland pines (P. nigra and P. sylvestris) and at the group of species level for the Mediterranean pines. Our study indicates that P. nigra was the dominant component of the last glacial south-western/central Iberian pinewoods, although the species composition of these woodlands varied in response to abrupt climate changes.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

10 Strategic Research Centers > Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research (OCCR)
08 Faculty of Science > Department of Biology > Institute of Plant Sciences (IPS) > Palaeoecology
08 Faculty of Science > Department of Biology > Institute of Plant Sciences (IPS)

UniBE Contributor:

Morales del Molino, Cesar

Subjects:

500 Science > 580 Plants (Botany)

ISSN:

0305-0270

Publisher:

Wiley

Language:

English

Submitter:

Peter Alfred von Ballmoos-Haas

Date Deposited:

15 Oct 2015 11:44

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 14:49

Publisher DOI:

10.1111/jbi.12566

Uncontrolled Keywords:

CART analysis; Iberian Peninsula; last glacial; palynology; Pinus halepensis; Pinus nigra; Pinus pinaster; Pinus pinea; Pinus sylvestris; pollen morphology

BORIS DOI:

10.7892/boris.72207

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/72207

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