Arctic plant species are expected to lose range due to climate change. One approach to preserve the genetic and species diversity for the future is to store propagules in seed vaults. However, germinability of seeds is assumed to be low for Arctic species. We evaluated ex situ storage potential of 113 of the 161 native angiosperms of Svalbard by studying seed ripening and germination. Seeds or bulbils ...

The European Alps are highly rich in species, but their future may be threatened by ongoing changes in human land use and climate. Here, we reconstructed vegetation, temperature, human impact and livestock over the past ~12,000 years from Lake Sulsseewli, based on sedimentary ancient plant and mammal DNA, pollen, spores, chironomids, and microcharcoal. We assembled a highly-complete local DNA ...

Loss-on-ignition (LOI) is the most widely used measure of organic matter in lake sediments, a variable related to both climate and land-use change. The main drawback for conventional measurement methods is the processing time and hence high labor costs associated with high-resolution analyses. On the other hand, broad-based near infrared reflectance spectroscopy (NIRS) is a time and cost efficient ...

Sedimentary DNA (sedDNA) has recently emerged as a new proxy for reconstructing past vegetation, but its taphonomy, source area and representation biases need better assessment. We investigated how sedDNA in recent sediments of two small Scottish lakes reflects a major vegetation change, using well-documented 20th Century plantations of exotic conifers as an experimental system. We used next-generation ...

Andøya on the NW coast of Norway is a key site for understanding the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) in northern Europe. Controversy has arisen concerning the local conditions, especially about the timing and extent of local glacial cover, maximum July temperatures and whether pine and/or spruce could have grown there. We reviewed all existing data and add newly analysed ancient sedimentary DNA ...

During the last glacial–interglacial cycle, Arctic biotas experienced substantial climatic changes, yet the nature, extent and rate of their responses are not fully understood1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8. Here we report a large-scale environmental DNA metagenomic study of ancient plant and mammal communities, analysing 535 permafrost and lake sediment samples from across the Arctic spanning the past 50,000 years. ...

The Neolithic and Bronze Age construction and habitation of the Stonehenge Landscape has been extensively explored in previous research. However, little is known about the scale of pre-Neolithic activity and the extent to which the later monumental complex occupied an ‘empty’ landscape. There has been a long-running debate as to whether the monumental archaeology of Stonehenge was created in an ...

Long-distance dispersal (LDD) processes influence the founder effect on islands.We use genetic data for 25 Atlantic species and similarities among regional floras to analyse colonization, and test whether the genetic founder effect on five islands is associated with dispersal distance, island size and species traits. Most species colonized postglacially via multiple dispersal events from several ...

Conservation strategies centered around species habitat protection rely on species’ dietary information. One species at the focal point of conservation efforts is the herbivorous grouse, the western capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus), which is an indicator species for forest biodiversity conservation. Non-molecular means used to study their diet are time-consuming and at low taxonomic resolution. This ...

Population size has increasingly been taken as the driver of past human environmental impact worldwide, and particularly in the Arctic. However, sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA), pollen and archaeological data show that over the last 12,000 years, paleoeconomy and culture determined human impacts on the terrestrial ecology of Arctic Norway. The large Mortensnes site complex (Ceavccagea ¯dgi, 70◦N) ...