Abstract
A major question of future global change concerns the rate of environmental (e.g. vegetation) response to the predicted, rapid, shifts in future climate. Specific questions are: is the environment, specifically the vegetation, in equilibrium with climate, or does it lag behind the climate change? What is the effect of scale, spatial and temporal, on environmental response to climate change? Records of past vegetation change offer a possibility to address these questions of response time and magnitude (Prentice 1986; Huntley 1990, 1991). At large spatial (continental-scale) and temporal (century) scales dynamic equilibrium between vegetation and climate seems a reasonable assumption (Prentice 1986). At fine scales the existence of equilibrium or lags is disputed (Webb 1986). The most productive approach to this dispute is the study of high-resolution, multi-proxy records. Here we present a high-resolution palaeoclimate study based on combined pollen and stable isotope (δD) analyses for the late-glacial portion of a peat core from Tierra del Fuego, that allowed us to address these questions of character and timing of climate change and vegetation response.
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© 1997 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Markgraf, V., Kenny, R. (1997). Character of rapid vegetation and climate change during the late-glacial in southernmost South America. In: Huntley, B., Cramer, W., Morgan, A.V., Prentice, H.C., Allen, J.R.M. (eds) Past and Future Rapid Environmental Changes. NATO ASI Series, vol 47. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-60599-4_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-60599-4_6
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