Petr Kuneš

Land-cover and diversity

Understanding pollen–vegetation relationship is crucial for accurate land-cover and biodiversity reconstructions. Over the last few decades, there has been a significant increase in studying pollen production and dispersal and pollen diversity in relation to plant diversity. In the scope of two projects, we gathered quite a large dataset of modern pollen and vegetation, which significantly enhanced our understanding of pollen productivity estimates in Central Europe’s landscape. We could then apply the quantitative techniques to reconstruct the postglacial landcover in many regions of Central Europe. We also combined our findings with data on pollen and vegetation diversity and used it for the past biodiversity reconstructions.

Land-cover reconstruction techniques were implemented in many international cooperations and networking platforms that enabled more continental applications, among all LANDCLIM and LandCover6k coordinated by Marie-José Gaillard and shielded by Shinya Sugita.

The applicability of quantitative techniques can be more challenging on continents, with the dominance of insect-pollinated plants such as Australia. Michela Mariani and Simon Connor and colleagues involved me in the research to understand pollen-vegetation relationships that helped the more realistic reconstruction of the cultural landscape in Tasmania.