DOI: 10.17864/1947.000343
title: Pollen data and charcoal data of the Iberian Peninsula (version 2)

description: Sedimentary charcoal, preserved in lakes, peatbogs and other anoxic environments, has been widely used as an indicator of past changes in fire regimes. Pollen records can be used to reconstruct past climate changes by deriving a statistical relationship between modern pollen abundance and modern climate and applying this relationship to fossil pollen assemblages. Here, we present pollen data and charcoal data from the Iberian Peninsula. The pollen data file includes basic information (e.g., latitude, longitude, elevation, source of the data, citation for original publication), age information (IPE age and IntCal20 mean and median ages and age uncertainties) and pollen counts for 205 taxa by depth (cm) for 120 sites (122 entities). The charcoal data file includes basic information (e.g., latitude, longitude, elevation, charcoal. count type and unit), age information (IntCal20 mean and median age and age uncertainties) and charcoal quantity by depth (cm) for 55 sites (78 entities). There are four main updates to the second version of Pollen data and charcoal data of the Iberian Peninsula: (1) the quality of the new age models created using IntCal20 calibration curve has been improved; (2) 9 more pollen entities have been added (ALCUDIA, ALGENDAR, GALDANA, CPORTER, ESGRAU, HTIMONER, TRAVESS1, PRATVILA, SONBOU) and one pollen entity removed (BAJONDI: the new age model cannot be correctly generated because of limited date information); 4 more charcoal entities have been added (El Payo core_50, El Payo core_50100, El Payo core_100150, El Payo core_150plus); (3) some charcoal entity names and charcoal site names have been edited to make them comparable with original sources and the Reading Palaeofire database (Harrison et al. 2021, https://doi.org/10.17864/1947.319); (4) some references and coordinates have been edited for consistency.
description: Pollen data were obtained from the European Pollen Database (EPD, www.europeanpollendatabase.net) or provided by the authors. Charcoal data were obtained from the Global Charcoal Database (Power et al., 2010; Marlon et al., 2016) or provided by the original authors.
description: Pollen data were obtained from the European Pollen Database (EPD, www.europeanpollendatabase.net), from PANGAEA (www.pangaea.de/) or provided by the authors (as indicated). Non-pollen palynomorphs (e.g. fungi, algae), introduced species, and fire-insensitive plants (e.g. obligate aquatics) were removed from the assemblages before analysis. Some pollen taxa are not identified consistently by palynologists or occur at very few sites, so some pollen types were amalgamated to higher taxonomic groups (mostly genera for trees, families for herbaceous taxa) for consistency across the records. This amalgamation was done in order to create a data set that was compatible with the SPECIAL Modern Pollen Database (Harrison, 2019), which is used as a training data set for climate reconstructions. Charcoal data were obtained from the Global Charcoal Database (Power et al., 2010; Marlon et al., 2016) or provided by the original authors (as indicated). New age models were created for both the pollen and the charcoal records using the IntCal20 calibration curve (Reimer et al., 2020) and the BACON Bayesian age-modelling tool in the rbacon package (2.5.0) in CRAN (Blaauw and Christeny, 2011) with the help of ageR package (Villegas-Diaz et al., 2021).