The Eurasian Modern Pollen Database (EMPD), version 2

The Eurasian (née European) Modern Pollen Database (EMPD) was established in 2013 to provide a public database of high-quality modern pollen surface samples to help support studies of past climate, land cover, and land use using fossil pollen. The EMPD is part of, and complementary to, the European Pollen Database (EPD) which contains data on fossil pollen found in Late Quaternary sedimentary archives throughout the Eurasian region. The EPD is in turn part of the rapidly growing Neotoma database, which is now the primary home for global palaeoecological data. This paper describes version 2 of the EMPD in which the number of samples held in the database has been increased by 60 % from 4826 to 8134. Much of the improvement in data coverage has come from northern Asia, and the database has consequently been renamed the Eurasian Modern Pollen Database to reflect this geographical enlargement. The EMPD can be viewed online using a dedicated map-based viewer at https://empd2.github.io and downloaded in a variety of file formats at https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.909130 (Chevalier et al., 2019)Swiss National Science Foundation | Ref. 200021_16959

The Eurasian Modern Pollen Database (EMPD), version 2

The Eurasian (nee European) Modern Pollen Database (EMPD) was established in 2013 to provide a public database of high-quality modern pollen surface samples to help support studies of past climate, land cover, and land use using fossil pollen. The EMPD is part of, and complementary to, the European Pollen Database (EPD) which contains data on fossil pollen found in Late Quaternary sedimentary archives throughout the Eurasian region. The EPD is in turn part of the rapidly growing Neotoma database, which is now the primary home for global palaeoecological data. This paper describes version 2 of the EMPD in which the number of samples held in the database has been increased by 60% from 4826 to 8134. Much of the improvement in data coverage has come from northern Asia, and the database has consequently been renamed the Eurasian Modern Pollen Database to reflect this geographical enlargement. The EMPD can be viewed online using a dedicated map-based viewer at https://empd2.github.io and downloaded in a variety of file formats at https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.909130 (Chevalier et al., 2019).Peer reviewe

A Holocene pollen record from the Laptev Sea shelf, northern Yakutia

Holocene shelf deposits from the Laptev Sea shelf (northern Yakutia) were investigated with palynological means. Data were obtained from a 467-cm-long sediment sequence from the southeastern Laptev Sea (74°30 N/136°00 E). The chronology of the core reaches back to 9.4 calendar years (cal. ka), yielding an average sample resolution of ∼100 years. The temporal changes in pollen and spore spectra of the marine record are primarily the result of variations of transport mechanisms, i.e., the large rivers draining into the shelf sea, the atmospheric circulation, and the coastal erosion. Because of the close land-shelf linkage due to riverine connections, the trends observed in the shelf data seem to be in good agreement with the Holocene vegetational evolution of the coastal hinterland. An enhanced transfer of tree pollen onto the shelf during the middle Holocene began around 7.5 cal. ka and is interpreted as the result of the northernmost occurrence of the treeline between 9 and 3.8 cal. ka. A similar time-coeval accordance between land and shelf pollen records is observed for the late Holocene climatic cooling trend in Arctic Siberia. In the shelf record, this cooling is characterized by increasing abundance of herbaceous pollen that commenced after 2.7 cal. ka, which is about 1 cal. ka later than on land