The canopy thermal response of natural forests to elevated CO 2 (eCO 2 ) is an understudied biophysical feedback in the global climate system. We investigated the effects of eCO 2 (150 μmol mol −1 above ambient) on canopy temperature ( T can ) dynamics of mature (> 175 years) Quercus robur (oak) at the Birmingham Institute for Forest Research Free Air CO 2 Enrichment (BIFoR‐FACE) facility in Staffordshire, England, during the...

Aim Pre‐degradation baseline conditions (references) provide crucial context for restoration actions. Here, we compare vegetation structure and its driving processes across the main pre‐agricultural references discussed for temperate Europe: the Last Interglacial and the early‐mid Holocene—before and after the arrival of Homo sapiens , respectively. Location Temperate Europe. Time Period The first ~4000–6000 years, excluding t...

Aim The Expansion‐Contraction model has been used to explain the responses of species to climatic changes. During periods of unfavourable climatic conditions, species retreat to refugia from where they may later expand. This paper focuses on the palaeoecology of red deer over the past 54 ka across Europe and the Urals, to reveal patterns of change in their range and explore the role of environmental conditions in determining t...

Climate warming and human landscape transformation during the Holocene resulted in environmental changes for wild animals. The last remnants of the European Pleistocene megafauna that survived into the Holocene were particularly vulnerable to changes in habitat. To track the response of habitat use and foraging of large herbivores to natural and anthropogenic changes in environmental conditions during the Holocene, we investig...

Aim The Mediterranean is characterized by diverse and spatially heterogeneous mosaic landscapes. Within this study, a cluster analysis‐based method is developed for the classification of Mediterranean vegetation types based on modern and fossil pollen datasets. The application of this approach to multiple pollen records spanning the Mediterranean region has allowed temporal variations in vegetation dynamics to be explored thro...

Accurate reconstruction of Lateglacial and Holocene relative sea‐level (RSL) histories is complicated where mismatches exist between geological data and RSL curves generated by models of glacio‐isostatic adjustment (GIA). In Ireland, such discrepancies have profound implications for interpreting the glacial history of the British Isles and for the use of glacial rebound models to predict future sea‐level changes. To address th...

Small islands tend to experience exacerbated environmental/social vulnerabilities, due to isolation, size and a small resource base. The response of social communities to environmental stress can be addressed by compiling palaeoecological proxies for land management alongside archaeological records. This paper presents pollen data from four new late Holocene sequences that lie around sea‐level on the Isles of Scilly (south‐wes...

Maps of continental‐scale land cover are utilized by a range of diverse users but whilst a range of products exist that describe present and recent land cover in Europe, there are currently no datasets that describe past variations over long time‐scales. User groups with an interest in past land cover include the climate modelling community, socio‐ecological historians and earth system scientists. Europe is one of the continen...

Aim Remote sensing coupled with direct observation allows recent changes in vegetation to be investigated but, in order to extend our understanding of land‐cover change further back in time, different proxies for vegetation are required. The pseudobiomization ( PBM ) approach has been developed to transform fossil pollen data into land‐cover classes ( LCC s) in order to reconstruct broad‐scale anthropogenic land‐use change thr...