A terrestrial scheme of vegetation events of the last 500,000 from southern Europe

A chronological framework for the four longest European pollen sequences is developed by alignment to the SPECMAP stack. Ages were assigned to the beginnings of forest periods on the basis that they are coincident with glacial-to-deglacial transitions in the marine isotopic record. The tuning of each pollen sequence to the same standard also indirectly led to the correlation of local terrestrial stages and the emergence of a coherent stratigraphic scheme for the last 500 000 years. Despite local floristic differences, the pollen records display a surprising degree of similarity in the relative expansion and contraction of forest and open vegetation communities. Comparison between the pollen and 1 s O sequences suggests that the many substages into which the oceanic record is divided are also appropriate for viewing the continental record. It has long been appreciated that the subdivision of Stage 5 is necessary to the understanding of the last interglacial, but the data we present show a similarly complex structure for earlier deglacial stages, with alternating forest and open vegetation intervals corresponding to the isotopic variations. Although comparison of the terrestrial and marine records shows good agreement, it also reveals that in some cases the pollen sequences have a different climate sensitivity to the benthic oxygen isotope record. What emerges is that an oxygen isotope record may not provide an appropriate template for fine tuning the terrestrial record and that better chronologies are critically needed for further in depth comparisons. An attempt is made to circumvent the land-sea connection and explore alternative approaches towards the systematic development of terrestrial chronologies.