Managing nature during times of rapid environmental dynamics as well as modelling of the future reaction, knowledge of ecosystem response to climatic changes throughout the geological past analysed on diachronic (time) and geographic (space) perspective is required. Alongside with this, knowledge of the interaction of ecosystem components on the various time scales is of vital importance, as these are unlikely to be linear. All together that provide more comprehensive insights into the environmental behaviour and is especially important analysing situation in the transitional environmental (glaciated-subglacial), climatic (oceanic-continental) and floristic (boreo-nemoral) zones, where most pronounced fluctuations might have occurred.
Being the crucial component of the ecosystem, vegetation is a key reservoir of biological diversity on our planet; one of its major ecological, social and economic services. Therefore, anticipating and modelling vegetation response to future challenges information on past reactions to external forcing is highly required. Interglacials, pronounced warm climatic events, that often lasted for thousands of years, could shed important light on the vegetation history and future trends subsequently. Hereby, intercorrelation of vegetation trends and subsequent complex analysis of the information, representing different interglacials, may enhance our knowledge about the spatiotemporal dynamics of the vegetation along the long-lasted time axis.
During the last decades palaeoebotanical disciplines have collected relevant, site-specific pollen and plant macro data representing two warm geological intervals, interglacials, named Holocene (present) and Eemian (previous) Interglacial of the Upper Pleistocene in the eastern Baltic. Analysis of the obtained data, including the application of the statistical approach, will provide more comprehensive insights into the palaeovegetation behaviour and that is especially important analysing situation in context of both internal and external drivers as well as making future forecast.
This PhD study project aims at the spatiotemporal reconstruction of the long-lasted vegetation dynamics throughout the warm intervals of the Upper Pleistocene (Eemian-Holocene) in the Eastern Baltic applying integrated statistical approach and providing remarkable input into the global knowledge of forest dynamics and potential future changes.
Realizing the objectives of the PhD studies, alongside with the involvement of rich palaeobotanical data set, classical statistical methods and programs (Statistica, PAST and etc.) together with the modern ones, i.e. R programmes and multivariate analysis (PCA, DCA, tb-PCA and etc.), including various modelling techniques (GLM, GLMM, GAM ir kt.), will be applied.
Alongside with this development of a new research agenda is going to be realised.