Sprecher
Beschreibung
The Eastern Adriatic provides a promising archive of Holocene plant biodiversity, framed by post-glacial climatic recovery and anthropogenic environment tempering processes which ultimately sculpted the modern Mediterranean biome. This study synthesizes regional palynological and geochemical datasets, focusing predominantly on published studies from the Kornati Archipelago and Mljet to track spatial and temporal shifts in regional Adriatic flora. Early Holocene pollen records from key coastal sites like the island of Cres and Vransko jezero near Biograd document the dominance of mesic forest taxa such as deciduous oak, hazel and pine.
Progressive anthropogenic pressure can be discerned through the appearance of cereal pollen at Čepić polje, olive and grape at Bokanjačko blato, Roman vineyards along the Neretva and persistent charcoal and burn horizons at Prapoče. The evidence traces a Neolithic-to-Roman arc of clearance that gradually replaced evergreen and deciduous oak forests with maquis, garrigue and pasture enhanced by abrupt events including the 8.2 ka cooling, sapropel S1 deposition, and Holocene sea-level fluctuations.
Cave deposits from Spila na Procjepom on Mljet island confirmed Mediterranean evergreen forest dominance alongside clear anthropogenic degradation toward maquis, while a Kornati islands’ marine core resolved the local imprint of the 8.2 ka event, vegetation responses to sea-level rise, and persistent low-intensity human pressure.
Our study seeks to address and resolve several remaining issues, such as differentiating between climate-driven or anthropogenic influences on the Kornati flora, determining the precise timing of Mediterranean sclerophylly appearance, and how the insular biogeography of these islands mediated the 8.2 ka response.