Department of Botany, Faculty of Science, Charles University, Benátská 2, 12800, Praha, Czech Republic.
Department of Vegetation Ecology, Institute of Botany of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Lidická 25/27, 602 00, Brno, Czech Republic.
Sci Rep. 2022 Oct 26;12(1):17937. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-22353-3.
Mitigating the effects of global change on biodiversity requires its understanding in the past. The main proxy of plant diversity, fossil pollen record, has a complex relationship to surrounding vegetation and unknown spatial scale. We explored both using modern pollen spectra in species-rich and species-poor regions in temperate Central Europe. We also considered the biasing effects of the trees by using sites in forests and open habitats in each region. Pollen samples were collected from moss polsters at 60 sites and plant species were recorded along two 1 km-transects at each site. We found a significant positive correlation between pollen and plant richness (alpha diversity) in both complete datasets and for both subsets from open habitats. Pollen richness in forest datasets is not significantly related to floristic data due to canopy interception of pollen rather than to pollen productivity. Variances (beta diversity) of the six pollen and floristic datasets are strongly correlated. The source area of pollen richness is determined by the number of species appearing with increasing distance, which aggregates information on diversity of individual patches within the landscape mosaic and on their compositional similarity. Our results validate pollen as a reconstruction tool for plant diversity in the past.
减轻全球变化对生物多样性的影响需要了解过去的情况。植物多样性的主要代表——化石花粉记录，与周围植被之间存在复杂的关系，且其空间尺度未知。我们在温带中欧物种丰富和物种贫乏的地区使用现代花粉谱对此进行了探索。我们还考虑了树木的偏置效应，在每个地区的森林和开阔生境中使用了样点。从 60 个地点的苔藓垫中采集了花粉样本，并在每个地点的两条 1 公里长的样带上记录了植物物种。我们发现，在完整数据集以及开阔生境的两个子集数据中，花粉和植物丰富度（alpha 多样性）之间存在显著正相关。由于树冠截留花粉而不是花粉生产力，森林数据集的花粉丰富度与植物区系数据没有显著的相关性。六个花粉和植物数据集的方差（beta 多样性）高度相关。花粉丰富度的源区由随着距离增加而出现的物种数量决定，它聚合了关于景观镶嵌体中单个斑块多样性的信息，以及它们在组成上的相似性。我们的结果验证了花粉作为过去植物多样性重建工具的有效性。
