Earth, Atmosphere & Environment Sciences
Title : | Quantification of pollen-based reconstructions of Holocene land cover of Southwest India for Earth system modelling |
Area of research : | Earth, Atmosphere & Environment Sciences |
Focus area : | Palaeoecology, Climate Modeling |
Principal Investigator : | Dr. Jyoti Srivastava, Birbal Sahni Institute Of Palaeosciences, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh |
Timeline Start Year : | 2023 |
Timeline End Year : | 2026 |
Contact info : | jyotisri.bsip@gmail.com |
Details
Executive Summary : | Mitigation strategies for lowering fossil carbon releases and monitoring the greenhouse gas impacts on Earth’s climate like sufficient afforestation of agricultural lands and grasslands alters the global land use/land cover. Quantitative reconstructions of the last interglacial (Holocene) land cover provides significant data source for unscrambling the natural and anthropogenic elements of land cover change. Current presence/absence data or natural vegetation types obtained from climate-based models are the main background data source for land cover while modelling past or future climatic scenarios which several times mislead the past and future estimations due to alterations in natural and manmade land cover. Even, past landcover estimations in climate models differ due to variances in the reconstruction methods and data sources through time and space. Therefore, consistent past land cover reconstructions are essential for enhancing the efficiency and robustness of paleoclimate simulations as well as for testing the anticipated future change scenarios. Fossil pollen plays a vital role as a direct proxy for estimating vegetation cover in the past and an indirect proxy for understanding past climate. The key parameters that influence the pollen-vegetation relationship involve variable pollen productivities and dispersion mechanisms of individual pollen taxa, spatial distribution of parent plant species i.e., community composition and structure, and distance from the sedimentary basin, along with the variation in depositional site i.e. sedimentary basin type and size. Rectifying the biases through these aspects offer a better evaluation of land cover. Estimation of Relative pollen productivity (RPP) from empirical vegetation and pollen data using ‘extended R Value model’ (ERV Model) has significantly reduced these issues. The diverse vegetation types in Southwest India have been the focus of many palaeoecological studies, but no pollen productivity estimates are available till date from this region to perform quantitative assessments. Reghu et al. (2019) first attempted estimation of RPPs in tropical Southeast India for 6 key taxa in Tropical Dry Evergreen Forests (TDEFs) and tested the model to reconstruct Holocene regional land-cover change. Hence, studies attempting to identify the modern pollen dispersion and deposition processes through ERV analysis, test models for pollen-vegetation-climate relationships and correlate these models (REVEALS, LOVE) and fossil pollen datasets for reconstructing the key plant species distribution at a continental spatial scale are much needed for climate modelling studies. |
Co-PI: | Dr. Ravikanth Gudasalam, Ashoka Trust For Research In Ecology And The Environment (Atree), Bengaluru, Karnataka-560064, Dr. Ganesan Rengaian, Ashoka Trust For Research In Ecology And The Environment (Atree), Bengaluru, Karnataka-560064 |
Total Budget (INR): | 34,77,859 |
Organizations involved