The impact of climate and land-use changes on the most southerly fir forests (Abies pinsapo) in Europe:

Current knowledge of climate change effects on forest ecology and species conservation should be linked to understanding of the past-time. Abies pinsapo forests constitute a model of an endangered ecosystem, highly vulnerable to ongoing warming, whose populations have been declining for centuries, while the drivers of this local depletion trend remain poorly understood. We hypothesized that long-term disturbances, both human- and natural-induced, have shaped A. pinsapo forests, contributing to these decline processes. Until today, studies using fossil pollen record to identify past climate impacts and land-use changes on A. pinsapo populations have not been done. Here, we investigate forests’ dynamics since the late Holocene (1180 cal. AD to present) in Southern Iberian Peninsula from a fossil pollen record by comparing the results obtained with climate fluctuations and land-uses changes. The pollen sequence shows a phase of stability during the Islamic Period (~1180–1400 cal. AD; ‘Medieval Climate Anomal...