Abstract
There is an urgent need for long-term (> 50 years) biodiversity data to assist in the prediction of future biodiversity changes in response to global change. Long-term ecological data such as pollen assemblages preserved in lake sediments can provide quantitative estimates for the last 8000 years of richness, evenness, composition, and turnover, the major components of biodiversity that determine the functional traits of ecosystems. Such estimates are biased, and this project develops and tests new methods for the unbiased estimation of these four components of biodiversity at sites situated in the major vegetation zones in Fennoscandia. It also attempts to calibrate pollen richness and plant-species richness and to synthesise, interpret, and model the biodiversity patterns in space and time.
Norway