THE VEGETATION CARBON STORAGE VARIATION IN EUROPE SINCE 6000-BP - RECONSTRUCTION FROM POLLEN

A method is devised to reconstruct the vegetation ecosystems from poll en data. The twelve ecosystems undisturbed by man used by Olson, Watts & Allison (1985) for Europe are refined into twenty-three more homoge neous entities. Each entity is characterized by three typical pollen s pectra. A canonical correlation analysis is performed to optimize the climatic signal in the pollen data. A set of 1249 modem spectra and 33 0 fossil spectra for 6000 BP is available. Each of these pollen spectr a is transformed into canonical coordinates and compared to the sixty- nine typical spectra to obtain the best analogue ecosystem. The carbon density provided by Olsen for each of the ecosystems are refined by u sing a regression model and a net Primary productivity model. The area covered by each of the ecosystems and these carbon densities are used to calculate the total carbon storage in the vegetation. In this stud y, we do not take into account the carbon stored in the soil. It appea rs that the carbon storage in the phytomass has not changed since 6000 BP, because the quasi-disappearance of the tundra was compensated by the extension of the deciduous forest which contains less carbon than the conifer forests.