Pollen-based reconstructions of late-Quaternary climate in Eurpoe - progress, problems, and pitfalls.

This paper reviews the basic concepts of pollen - climate transfer functions used to reconstruct quantitative past climates from fossil pollen assemblages. The various assumptions and requirements are outlined and progress in developing detailed regional pollen - climate calibration sets and resulting transfer functions in Europe is discussed. Current problems in the existing approaches are presented, and the inherent pitfalls of pollen-stratigraphical data as a climatic proxy are discussed. Despite these problems and pitfalls, pollen-based climate reconstructions in northern Europe are generally consistent and agree well with other independent climatic reconstructions, at least at broad millennial scales.

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