Data from: Proxy comparison in ancient peat sediments: pollen, macrofossil and plant DNA

We compared DNA, pollen and macrofossil data obtained from Weichselian interstadial and Holocene (maximum age 8400 cal yr BP) peat sediments from northern Europe and used them to reconstruct contemporary floristic compositions at two sites. The majority of the samples provided plant DNA sequences of...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Parducci, Laura, Väliranta, Minna, Salonen, J. Sakari, Ronkainen, Tiina, Matetovici, Irina, Fontana, Sonia L., Eskola, Tiina, Sarala, Pertti, Suyama, Yoshihisa
Format: Dataset
Language:unknown
Published: 2015
Subjects:
Alnus
Pinus
Nymphaea
Sphagnum
Salix
genetics
Ulmus
Plant Science
Sorbus
Betula
6000-52000 yr BP
Picea
Ner
Northern Finland
Online Access:https://zenodo.org/record/5007691
https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.mh981
Description
Summary:We compared DNA, pollen and macrofossil data obtained from Weichselian interstadial and Holocene (maximum age 8400 cal yr BP) peat sediments from northern Europe and used them to reconstruct contemporary floristic compositions at two sites. The majority of the samples provided plant DNA sequences of good quality with success amplification rates depending on age. DNA and sequencing analysis provided five plant taxa from the older site and nine taxa from the younger site, corresponding to 7% and 15% of the total number of taxa identified by the three proxies together. At both sites, pollen analysis detected the largest (54) and DNA the lowest (10) number of taxa, but five of the DNA taxa were not detected by pollen and macrofossils. The finding of a larger overlap between DNA and pollen than between DNA and macrofossils proxies seems to go against our previous suggestion based on lacustrine sediments that DNA originates principally from plant tissues and less from pollen. At both sites, we also detected Quercus spp. DNA, but few pollen grains were found in the record, and these are normally interpreted as long-distance dispersal. We confirm that in palaeoecological investigations, sedimentaryDNA analysis is less comprehensive than classical morphological analysis, but is a complementary and important tool to obtain a more complete picture of past flora. trnL sequencesThe file include trnL sequences obtained using Sanger/cloning technique at Uppsala University from sedimentary (bulk) DNA samples from peat layers located on in Northern Finland (NEF)and in Northern Russia (NER)

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