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North American pollen records provide evidence for macroscale ecological changes in the Anthropocene

M. Stegner,Trisha L. Spanbauer

Published 2023 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

ABSTRACT

Significance Paleoecological records are critical for contextualizing modern global change, and fossil pollen from sediment cores is commonly used to reconstruct past vegetation. Here, we use hundreds of pollen records from lacustrine sediment cores across North America to track biodiversity and community changes since the end Pleistocene to the present day on regional and continental scales. We find that vegetation changes in the last few hundred years are on par with those seen during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition and include increases in first and last appearances as well as abrupt community changes. This suggests that anthropogenically driven changes have had as much impact on the landscape as deglaciation and lends support to the designation of the Anthropocene as an epoch.

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