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Pollen accumulation rates as a tool for detecting land-use changes in a sparsely settled boreal forest

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Abstract

A peat profile from the village of Nellim in northern Finnish Lapland was analysed at a near-annual resolution in order to test to what degree of accuracy the land-use history of the village could be reconstructed on the basis of organic microfossils. The profile was first AMS 14C dated and a robust chronology constructed to enable near-annual sampling. A set of 47 contiguous samples were treated and counted to produce a pollen accumulation rate diagram (PAR, grains cm−2 year−1). PARs enabled a better distinction of the fine-scale human induced changes in the pollen assemblages than the classical percentage representation because real changes in each pollen taxon could be followed. Changes in the accumulation rate of pine pollen reflect regional changes in forest-use in Lapland and both local events and regional logging activity could be distinguished. Local within-mire changes were deduced from the peat stratigraphy and the testate amoebae. The limitations for using PARs seem to be connected to the physiology of the plants and the taphonomy of the different pollen types and this must be taken into account when making interpretations.

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Acknowledgments

The first author would like to thank her colleagues in the palaeoecology group at the Department of Geosciences for inspiring discussions and coffee breaks during the course of this study. Chris Caseldine is thanked for valuable comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. Antti Huusko is sincerely thanked for the assistance with all the mathematical problems. Kristiina Karjalainen assisted in drawing the maps in Fig. 1. Further thanks to Timme Donders and André F. Lotter who both provided valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper. The funding for this research was provided by the Academy of Finland (project NORDPINE 1205995). This article is also a contribution to EU-funded project Predicting Impacts on Natural Ecotones (PINE EVK2-CT-2002-00136).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Geosciences, PO Box 3000, 90014, University of Oulu, Finland

    Mari Kuoppamaa & Sheila Hicks

  2. Faculty of Physics, Adam Mickiewicz University, ul. Umultowska 85, 61-614, Poznan, Poland

    Tomasz Goslar

  3. Poznan Radiocarbon Laboratory, ul. Rubiez 46, 61-612, Poznan, Poland

    Tomasz Goslar

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  1. Mari Kuoppamaa
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  2. Tomasz Goslar
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  3. Sheila Hicks
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Correspondence to Mari Kuoppamaa.

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Communicated by A.F. Lotter.

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Kuoppamaa, M., Goslar, T. & Hicks, S. Pollen accumulation rates as a tool for detecting land-use changes in a sparsely settled boreal forest. Veget Hist Archaeobot 18, 205–217 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-008-0205-3

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