Beyond the closed-forest paradigm: Cross-scale vegetation structure in temperate Europe before the late-Quaternary megafauna extinctions
Authors: Elena A. Pearce, Florence Mazier, Charles W. Davison, Oliver Baines, Szymon Czyzewski, Ralph Fyfe, Krzysztof Binka, Steve Boreham, Jacques-Louis de Beaulieu, Cunhai Gao, Wojciech Granoszewski, Anna Hrynowiecka, Małgorzata Malkiewicz, Tim Mighall, Bozena ˙ Nory´skiewicz, Irena Agnieszka Pidek, Jaqueline Strahl, Hanna Winter, Jens-Christian Svenning
Date: 01/03/2025
Publisher: Earth History & Biodiversity
The study challenges the long-standing assumption that Europe’s temperate landscapes were uniformly covered by closed forest before human impact. They use pollen analyses to reconstruct vegetation patterns from the Last Interglacial and uncover a highly heterogeneous landscape – not the dense, continuous forests often assumed.
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