Pollen Analysis
Introduction
Pollen analysis is a scientific method that can reveal evidence of past ecological and climate changes: it combines the principles of stratigraphy with observations of actual (modern) pollen-vegetation relationships in order to reconstruct the terrestrial vegetation of the past.
Early history
Pollen analysis plays a critical role in climate change studies during the Quaternary (Fægri and Iverson, 1975) and is the single most important branch of paleoecology for the late Pleistocene and Holocene (Roberts, 1998). Its scientific scope is broad since it encompasses knowledge from many disciplines including botany, geology, ecology, climatology and archeology. The extent to which a pollen analysis study may be slanted toward botanical, ecological or geological questions will depend on the sedimentary deposits analyzed and the researcher’s background. Pollen analysis may be utilized for the evaluation of vegetation changes occurring as recently as the Holocene. It may also be...
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