Ancient DNA of NW Europe Reveals Repsonses to Climate Change, 2015

• Main Author: Alsos, Inger Greve
• Format: Dataset
• Language: unknown
• Published: NSD – Norwegian Centre for Research Data 2016
• Subjects: Plant and animal distribution; Natural environment; Andøya; Arctic; Norway; Svalbard; Arctic Archipelago; Climate change; Global warming
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.18712/nsd-nsd2326-v1; http://search.nsd.no/study/NSD2326/?version=1

Andøya (69 °N) is a key area for data on terrestrial flora and vegetation in Norway during the Late Weichselian (25,000 to 10,000 years (uncalibrated) B.P.). Cores covering most of this time interval has been retrieved from several lakes, confirming the existence of an ice-free area potentially serving as a 'cryptic' refugium at a time when almost all of Scandinavia was covered by ice. The sediments contain small quantities of pollen of tree species (Betula, Picea, Pinus); so far interpreted as deriving from long distance dispersal. A recent study of ancient sediment DNA in one of the lakes yielded DNA of pine (Pinus) and spruce (Picea) dated at c. 22,000 and 17,500 cal years BP, respectively, indicating that these species possibly survived in northern in situ refugia. If the source of this DNA is confirmed as locally growing trees, this means that pine and spruce were present in Scandinavia more than 10,000 years earlier than previously assumed. Similarly, recent findings of ancient DNA of thermophilic t axa in the geographically isolated arctic archipelago Svalbard indicate that species had a more northern distribution in the Holocene hypsithermal (4000 - 8000 years BP) than today. We proposed to investigate the late glacial flora of Andøya and Svalbard by: 1) Using recently developed high throughput sequencing technologies to analyse ancient sediment DNA in four new sediment cores from each of Andøya and Svalbard, 2) Analysing modern lake sediments and current vegetation from the two sites to evaluate the correlation between species frequency in the vegetation, and likelihood of representation in the sediment DNA samples, and 3) Assess if the methods used for extraction and amplification of ancient sediment DNA were likely to yield DNA from pollen grains within the sediments. The aim of this study was to increase our understanding of how species responded to climate change in the past, which is essential to forecast effects of current global warming.