Vegetation patterns in the Southern Apennines (Italy) during MIS 13: Deciphering pollen variability along a NW-SE transect

Pollen data from five palaeo-lacustrine basins are used in this study to correlate floral and vegetation patterns along a NW-SE transect in the Southern Apennines (Italy) during Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 13. Compositional Data Analysis (CoDA) is applied to pollen data in order to better define and explain the main differences in the pollen composition of coeval records. Pollen data belonging to MIS 13, chosen on the basis of a constrained cluster analysis on each entire record, have been analyzed through a non-constrained cluster analysis. The relative variation biplot, the parametric and the non-parametric MANOVA computed for the MIS 13 pollen data, show that samples belonging to the different sites are distinct by their average composition. This means that each site has a distinctive character of forest landscape, which could have been the result of local environmental (physical) factors, such as mesoclimate, topography and edaphic humidity, and/or of historical factors such as species composition of refuges and temporary changes in environmental conditions due to disturbance ecology.