Holocene vegetation and climate dynamics in the Altai Mountains and Surrounding Areas

A comprehensive understanding of the regional vegetation responses to long-term climate change will help to forecast Earth system dynamics. Based on a new well-dated pollen data set from Kanas Lake and a review on the published pollen records in and around the Altai Mountains, the regional vegetation dynamics and forcing mechanisms are discussed. In the Altai Mountains, the forest optimum occurred during 10-7ka for the upper forest zone and the tree line decline and/or ecological shifts were caused by climatic cooling from around 7ka. In the lower forest zone, the forest reached an optimum in the middle Holocene, and then increased openness of the forest, possibly caused by both climate cooling and human activities, took place in the late Holocene. In the lower basins or plains around the Altai Mountains, the development of protograssland or forest benefited from increasing humidity in the middle to late Holocene. Plain Language Summary In the Altai Mountains and surrounding area of central Asia, the previous studies of the Holocene paleovegetation and paleoclimate studies did not discuss the different ecological limiting factors for the vegetation in high mountains and low-elevation areas due to limited data. With accumulating fossil pollen data and surface pollen data, it is possible to understand better the geomorphological effect on the vegetation and discrepancies of vegetation/forest responses to large-scale climate forcing, and it is also possible to get reliable quantitative reconstructions of climate. Here our new pollen data and review on the published fossil pollen data will help us to look into the past climate change and vertical evolution of vegetation in this important area of the Northern Hemisphere. Based on our study, it can be concluded that the growth of taiga forest in the wetter areas may be promoted under a future warmer climate, while the forest in the relatively dry areas is liable to decline, and the different vegetation dynamics will contribute to future high-resolution coupled vegetation-climate model for Earth system modelling.