Concepts and methodology to quantitatively reconstruct climate from pollen data

Pollen data are widely used as proxies to reconstruct past vegetation and climate changes. During the last decades numerical techniques have been developed to quantitatively estimate climate parameters from fossil pollen assemblages. This contribution introduces first the concepts and methodologies based on modern calibration sets to obtain past climate reconstructions. Then, focusing on high-elevation environments, the use of elevational transects as a tool for the evaluation of pollen-climate models and a temperature reconstruction obtained from an alpine fossil site are presented.