Validation of Pollen Studies

Plant macrofossils and pollen play complementary roles in paleoecology. Each has its own advantages and shortcomings. Used separately, they provide valuable information about past vegetation. Used together, the two types of data can corroborate or, occasionally, challenge each other, and they can provide more detailed and refined understanding of past vegetation at multiple spatial scales. In this article, we briefly compare and contrast the floraand vegetation-sensing properties of pollen and macrofossil data and then present a series of case studies in which the two data sets have been used together profitably at spatial scales ranging from local to continental. We focus on macrofossils from ‘wet’ sediments (lakes, peatlands, buried soils, fluvial deposits, etc.) and do not explicitly treat macrofossils from rodent middens and archeological sites.