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A 180,000-year pollen record from Owens Lake, CA: terrestrial vegetation change on orbital scales

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Wallace B. Woolfenden
Wallace B. Woolfenden*
Affiliation:
Mountain Heritage Associates, USDA Forest Service, P.O. Box 429, Lee Vining, CA 93541, USA
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Abstract

Pollen from the upper 90 m of core OL-92 from Owens Lake is a climatically sensitive record of vegetation change that indicates shifts in the plant associations representing warm and cold desertscrub, pinyon–juniper woodland, and pine–fir forest during the past 180,000 years. These changes are synchronized with glacial–interglacial cycles. During glacial and stadial climates, juniper woodland expanded downslope and replaced warm desert shrubs while upper montane and subalpine forests in the arid Inyo Mountains also expanded, and those in the Sierra Nevada were displaced by the ice cap and periglacial conditions. Conversely, during interglacial and interstadial climates, warm desert plants expanded their range in the lowlands, juniper and sagebrush retreated upslope, and montane and subalpine forests expanded in the Sierra Nevada. The reconstructed vegetation history demonstrates a regional climatic response, and the congruence of the pollen sequence with marine and ice cap oxygen isotope stratigraphies suggests a link between regional vegetation and global climate change at orbital scales.

Keywords

Vegetation dynamicsPollen recordsPaleocologyClimate changeGlacial cyclesOwens ValleyCalifornia
Type
Articles
Information
Quaternary Research , Volume 59 , Issue 3 , May 2003 , pp. 430 - 444
Copyright
Elsevier Science (USA)

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