Vegetation stability during the last two centuries on the western Tibetan Plateau: a palynological evidence

Abstract

Investigating the dynamics of vegetation is an essential basis to know how to protect ecological environments and to help predict any changes in trend. Because of its fragile alpine ecosystem, the Tibetan Plateau is a particularly suitable area for studying vegetation changes and their driving factors. In this study, we present a high-resolution pollen record covering the last two centuries extracted from Gongzhu Co on the western Tibetan Plateau. Alpine steppe is the predominant vegetation type in the surrounding area throughout the past 250 years with stable vegetation composition and abundance, as revealed by pollen spectra dominated by Artemisia, Ranunculaceae, Cyperaceae, and Poaceae. Detrended canonical correspondence analysis (DCCA) of the pollen data reveals low turnover in compositional species (0.41 SD), suggesting that the vegetation in the Gongzhu catchment had no significant temporal change, despite climate change and population increases in recent decades. We additionally ran DCCA on ten other pollen records from the Tibetan Plateau with high temporal resolution (1–20 years) covering recent centuries, and the results also show that compositional species turnover (0.15–0.81 SD) is relatively low, suggesting that the vegetation stability may have prevailed across the Tibetan Plateau during recent centuries. More high-resolution pollen records and high taxonomic-resolution palaeo-vegetation records (such as sedaDNA), however, are needed to confirm the vegetation stability on the Tibetan Plateau.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

pollen / compositional species turnover / vegetation change / ecological stability

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Basic Science Center for Tibetan Plateau Earth System (BSCTPES, NSFC project No. 41988101), and CAS Pioneer Hundred Talents Program (Xianyong Cao). Cathy Jenks provided help with language editing.

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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