HOPE-UIB-BIO/Global_RoC: first public release

Title Global acceleration in rates of vegetation change over the past 18,000 years

Authors Ondřej Mottl, Suzette G.A. Flantua, Kuber P. Bhatta, Vivian A. Felde, Thomas Giesecke, Simon Goring, Eric C. Grimm, Simon Haberle, Henry Hooghiemstra, Sarah Ivory, Petr Kuneš, Steffen Wolters, Alistair W. R. Seddon, John W. Williams

Corresponding authors Ondrej Mottl (ondrej.mottl@gmail.com), Suzette Flantua (s.g.a.flantua@gmail.com)

Description This repo consists of code to estimate global patterns of rate-of-change (RoC) from fossil pollen sequences obtained from Neotoma (https://www.neotomadb.org/). The RoC estimation is based on the R-Ratepol package (https://github.com/HOPE-UIB-BIO/R-Ratepol-package).

One sentence summary A compilation of over 1000 fossil pollen sequences shows that global vegetation change accelerated several thousand years ago.

Abstract Global vegetation over the last 18,000 years was transformed first by the climate changes accompanying the last deglaciation and again by increasing human pressures, but the magnitude and patterns of rates of vegetation change are poorly understood globally. Using a compilation of 1181 fossil pollen sequences and new statistical methods, we detect a worldwide acceleration in rates of vegetation compositional change beginning between 4.6 and 2.9 ka that is globally unprecedented over the last 18,000 years in magnitude and extent. Late Holocene rates of change equal or exceed deglacial rates for all continents, suggesting that the scale of human impacts on terrestrial ecosystems exceeds even the climate-driven transformations of the last deglaciation. The acceleration of biodiversity change demonstrated in last-century ecological datasets began millennia ago.