Late Holocene Vegetation and Climate Reconstruction from Dongjiyu Island

Approximately 2000 years of paleoenvironmental data from Dongjiyu Island in the Taiwan Strait reconstruct vegetation shifts and human activity. The dataset includes pollen analysis and organic geochemistry proxies like total organic carbon, total nitrogen, and stable carbon isotopes (δ¹³C). It captures climate transitions from drier to wetter conditions and links increased cultivated grasses to historical Han Chinese and Japanese colonial settlement.

Use Cases

• Reconstructing past vegetation shifts based on pollen records of Poaceae and Cyperaceae.
• Analyzing climate change signals using organic geochemistry proxies like TOC/TN ratios and δ¹³C.
• Investigating historical human settlement patterns through the proxy of cultivated Poaceae pollen.
• Studying long-distance pollen transport by comparing trace arboreal pollen to local non-arboreal pollen.

Strengths

• Provides the first site-specific, integrated multiproxy paleoenvironmental reconstruction for the Taiwan Strait area.
• Covers a significant temporal range of approximately 2000 calibrated years before present.
• Data is openly licensed under CC-BY-4.0, facilitating reuse and sharing.

Limitations

• Column names and exact row counts are not provided, limiting precise understanding of data structure.
• The dataset's size is listed as 18900, but the unit (e.g., bytes, rows) is ambiguous.
• The temporal reconstruction is based on proxy data and calibrated dates, not direct instrumental measurements.

Provenance

Source

Ranjan Kumar Mohanty

Collection Method

Palynological analyses and organic geochemistry performed on a wetland sediment profile.

Time Range

~2000 cal yr BP to present

Freshness

Last updated on 2026-03-23.

Geography

Dongjiyu Island (DGY) in the Taiwan Strait, Penghu Islands.