Terrestrial plant microfossils in palaeoenvironmental studies, pollen, microcharcoal and phytolith. Towards a comprehensive understanding of vegetation, fire and climate changes over the past one million years

摘要

The Earth has experienced large changes in global and regional climates over the past one million years.Understanding processes and feedbacks that control those past environmental changes is of great interestfor better understanding the nature, direction and magnitude of current climate change, its effect on life,and on the physical, biological and chemical processes and ecosystem services important for human well-being. Microfossils from terrestrial plants – pollen, microcharcoal and phytoliths – preserved in terrestrialand marine sedimentary archives are particularly useful tools to document changes in vegetation, fire andland climate. They are well-preserved in a variety of depositional environments and provide quantitativereconstructions of past land cover and climate. Those microfossil data are widely available from publicarchives, and their spatial coverage includes almost all regions on Earth, including both high and low lati-tudes and altitudes. Here, we (i) review the laboratory procedures used to extract those microfossils fromsediment for microscopic observations and the qualitative and quantitative information they provide,(ii) highlight the importance of regional and global databases for large-scale syntheses of environmentalchanges, and (iii) review the application of terrestrial plant microfossil records in palaeoclimatology andpalaeoecology using key examples from specific regions and past periods.