Holocene vegetation and fire dynamics at Crveni Potok, a small mire in the Dinaric Alps (Tara National Park, Serbia)

•We reconstruct vegetation and fire history using pollen, plant macrofossils, charcoal.•We found persistence of high forest cover during pre-historical and historical time.•P. omorika needle findings cluster at times of biomass-burning phases.•Support the notion of good post-fire recovery of P. omorika.

We analysed sediments from Crveni Potok (Tara Mountains, Serbia), a key site in the Dinaric Alps because it is located within the restricted distribution range of the endemic conifer Picea omorika (Serbian spruce), and thereby bears a unique potential in revealing its Holocene history. We used a set of proxies (pollen, plant-macrofossils, charcoal) to reconstruct the long-term vegetation and fire histories at different spatial scales. The comprehensive snapshot provided by the reconstructions fill an important gap of European long-term vegetation and fire histories in the overall data-coverage poor region of the Dinaric Alps. The reconstructions unfolded an unusual late-Holocene persistence of high forest cover that contrasts with the large majority of European landscape-scale forest-cover records, which show massive anthropogenic openings in the past two millennia. We also found evidence for good post-fire recovery of the currently threatened endemic P. omorika populations. This leads us to suggest that prescribed-burning programmes may be beneficial to reduce the vulnerability of the species, and for ecological restoration and conservation purposes of the declining and endangered populations.