Late glacial to Holocene climate and vegetation changes on the Tibetan Plateau inferred from fossil pollen records in lacustrine sediments The past climate in central Asia and especially on the Tibetan Plateau (TP) is of great importance for an understanding of global climate processes and for predicting the future climate. As a major influence on the climate in this region the Asian Summer Monsoon (ASM) and its evolutionary history are of vital importance for accurate predictions. However neither the evolutionary pattern of the summer monsoon nor the driving mechanisms behind it are yet clearly understood. For this research I first synthesized previously published Late Glacial to Holocene climatic records from monsoonal central Asia in order to extract the general climate signals and the associated summer monsoon intensities. New climate and vegetation sequences were then established using improved quantitative methods focusing on fossil pollen records recovered from Tibetan lakes and also incorporating new modern datasets. The pollen vegetation and vegetation climate relationships on the TP were also evaluated in order to achieve a better understanding of fossil pollen records. The synthesis of previously published moisture related palaeoclimate records in monsoonal central Asia revealed generally different temporal patterns for the two monsoonal subsystems i.e. the Indian Summer Monsoon (ISM) and East Asian Summer Monsoon (EASM). The ISM appears to have experienced maximum wet conditions during the early Holocene while many records from the area affected by the EASM indicate relatively dry conditions at that time particularly in north central China where the maximum moisture levels occurred during the middle Holocene. A detailed consideration of possible driving factors affecting the summer monsoon including summer solar insolation and sea surface temperatures revealed that the ISM was primarily driven by variations in northern hemisphere solar insolation and that the EASM may have been constrained by the ISM resulting in asynchronous patterns of evolution for these two subsystems. This hypothesis is further supported by modern monsoon indices estimated using the NCEP NCAR Reanalysis data from the last 50 years which indicate a significant negative correlation between the two summer monsoon subsystems. By analogy with the early Holocene intensification of the ISM during coming decades could lead to increased aridification elsewhere as a result of the asynchronous nature of the monsoon subsystems as can already be observed in the meteorological data from the last 15 years. A quantitative climate reconstruction using fossil pollen records was achieved through analysis of sediment core recovered from Lake Donggi Cona (in the north eastern part of the TP) which has been dated back to the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). A new data set of modern pollen collected from large lakes in arid to semi arid regions of central Asia is also presented herein. The concept of pollen source area was introduced to modern climate calibration based on pollen from large lakes and was applied to the fossil pollen sequence from Lake Donggi Cona. Extremely dry conditions were found to have dominated the LGM and a subsequent gradually increasing trend in moisture during the Late Glacial period was terminated by an abrupt reversion to a dry phase that lasted for about 1000 years and coincided with the first Heinrich Event of the northern Atlantic region. Subsequent periods corresponding to the warm Bølling Allerød period and the Younger Dryas cold event were followed by moist conditions during the early Holocene with annual precipitation of up to about 400 mm. A slightly drier trend after 9 cal ka BP was then followed by a second wet phase during the middle Holocene that lasted until 4.5 cal ka BP. Relatively steady conditions with only slight fluctuations then dominated the late Holocene resulting in the present climatic conditions. In order to investigate the relationship between vegetation and climate temporal variations in the possible driving factors for vegetation change on the northern TP were examined using a high resolution late Holocene pollen record from Lake Kusai. Moving window Redundancy Analyses (RDAs) were used to evaluate the correlations between pollen assemblages and individual sedimentary proxies. These analyses have revealed frequent fluctuations in the relative abundances of alpine steppe and alpine desert components and in particular a decrease in the total vegetation cover at around 1500 cal a BP. The climate was found to have had an important influence on vegetation changes when conditions were relatively wet and stable. However after the 1500 cal a BP threshold in vegetation cover was crossed the vegetation appears to have been affected more by extreme events such as dust storms or fluvial erosion than by the general climatic trends. In addition pollen spectra over the last 600 years have been revealed by Procrustes analysis to be significantly different from those recovered from older samples which is attributed to an increased human impact that resulted in unprecedented changes to the composition of the vegetation. Theoretical models that have been developed and widely applied to the European area (i.e. the Extended R Value (ERV) model and the Regional Estimates of Vegetation Abundance from Large Sites (REVEALS) model) have been applied to the high alpine TP ecosystems in order to investigate the pollen vegetation relationships as well as for quantitative reconstructions of vegetation abundance. The modern pollen–vegetation relationships for four common pollen species on the TP have been investigated using Poaceae as the reference taxa. The ERV Submodel 2 yielded relatively high PPEs for the steppe and desert taxa (Artemisia Chenopodiaceae) and low PPEs for the Cyperaceae that are characteristic of the alpine Kobresia meadows. The plant abundances on the central and north eastern TP were quantified by applying these PPEs to four post Late Glacial fossil pollen sequences. The reconstructed vegetation assemblages for the four pollen sequences always yielded smaller compositional species turnovers than suggested by the pollen spectra indicating that the strength of the previously reported vegetation changes may therefore have been overestimated. In summary the key findings of this thesis are that (a) the two ASM subsystems show asynchronous patterns during both the Holocene and modern time periods (b) fossil pollen records from large lakes reflect regional signals for which the pollen source areas need to be taken into account (c) climate is not always the main driver for vegetation change and (d) previously reported vegetation changes on the TP may have been overestimated because they ignored inter species variations in pollen productivity