Modern Pollen—Vegetation Relationships

Abstract

The establishment of the field of Quaternary paleoecology is commonly considered to be Lennart von Post’s presentation before the 16th Convention of Scandinavian Naturalists held in Oslo, Norway, in 1916. In his lecture entitled “Forest tree pollen in south Swedish peat.bog deposits”, von Post described his pioneering efforts to examine fossil-pollen assemblages preserved within late-Quaternary peat deposits of Scandinavian bogs. By counting a number of grains of different pollen types at each of many levels within the peat deposits, von Post noted the succession of changing pollen assemblages that he interpreted in terms of the postglacial development of plant communities. He identified the replacement of mixed oak forest by beech—spruce forest and interpreted this change in terms of changing climate, immigrations of tree species, and competition at both the species and community level. Von Post was the first to recognize the need for documentation of modern pollen—vegetation relationships as a prerequisite for interpreting changes in forest communities through time. According to von Post (1916, translated by Davis and Faegri 1967), “As long as we have no indices to express the relative pollen productivity of the various trees, nor to express the different degrees to which their pollen is dispersed, we have no right to seek in the [pollen] percentage figures an adequate expression of the composition of the [past] forest communities” (p. 390, words in brackets added for clarification).