Higher taxa as paleoecological and paleoclimatic indicators: A search for the modern analog of the Florissant fossil flora

We used higher taxonomic composition of 241 modern forest plots from across the New World to identify the closest modern analog of the Florissant fossil flora and to infer Late Eocene paleotemperature for Florissant. Non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMS) based on both genus and family presence-absence placed Florissant in a no-analog taxonomic space surrounded by North American warm temperate broadleaved forests, Mexican humid pine-oak forests, and subtropical moist forests from Florida, Mexico, and Argentina. The most similar site to Florissant, as indicated by the mean of Euclidean distances in genus and family NMS space, was a subtropical moist forest in southern Florida, followed by the humid pine-oak forests of central and northeastern Mexico, and the broadleaved deciduous forests of eastern North America.

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