Eurasian Pollen Data from 21ka to Present

21,000 years to the present of fossil and modern pollen data from 96 sites across Eurasia north of 40°N. The data was collated and taxonomically standardized during a 2008 NERC QUEST workshop. It provides a spatially and temporally structured record for studying vegetation and biome changes.

Use Cases

• Reconstructing past vegetation and biome distributions based on pollen assemblage data.
• Modeling climate-vegetation feedbacks over the Late Quaternary using standardized time slices.
• Calibrating or validating pollen-based climate proxies across a broad Eurasian transect.
• Studying taxonomic changes and plant community evolution over millennia using the redundancy-free taxonomy.

Strengths

• Provides a standardized, redundancy-free taxonomy, ensuring consistent species identification across records.
• Offers a structured temporal framework with data assigned to 1,000-year time slices from 21ka to present.
• Covers a wide geographical transect from 24°E (Western Ukraine/Belarus) to easternmost Siberia.

Limitations

• Column names and data structure are not described in any source, limiting understanding of the internal schema.
• Key metadata such as row count, file size, and a complete column list are absent from all platform entries.
• The 'last updated' date (2026-07-02) appears future-dated, which may indicate a metadata error or placeholder value.

Provenance

Source

University of Southampton, Heather Binney

Collection Method

Collated during a workshop held in the UK in 2008 as part of the NERC QUEST programme.

Time Range

21ka to present

Freshness

2026-07-02 19:07:57.985664

Geography

96 sites from 24°E (western Ukraine and Belarus) to easternmost Siberia, north of latitude 40°N.