Data from: Increased Holocene diversity in Europe linked to human-associated vegetation change

It is widely reported that aspects of present-day global biodiversity are
declining, with humans largely to blame. However – perhaps paradoxically –
in Europe, floristic diversity and human populations have grown in tandem
for millennia. Disturbance intensity and habitat heterogeneity potentially
explain this phenomenon, though we lack understanding of how human land
use intensity affected biodiversity at numerous spatial scales over the
Holocene. In this work, we examined the spatio-temporal dynamics of, and
relationships between, floristic richness, evennes,s and compositional
turnover with an index of anthropogenic vegetation change (frequencies of
human-associated pollen types) since 11,700 cal yr BP, analysing 7,853
pollen samples from 213 records (sites). We evaluated how changes to the
proportional site occupancies of human-associated and other taxa related
to diversity patterns. We found that (1) Floristic richness,
evenness, and compositional turnover all increased from 9,000 years ago to
1850 CE. (2) Temporal increases in richness and evenness were positively
associated with the anthropogenic vegetation index at the majority of
vegetation zones (~biome) and sites, whereas compositional turnover was
only associated with the anthropogenic index at the site level. (3)
Holocene site occupancies of all human-associated taxa were positively
associated with biodiversity gains, whereas the results for other taxa
(that were not associated with people) were mixed. All data for these
analyses are freely available and, where possible, provided. Where reuse
licences prohibit the republishing of data, citations are provided for the
user to download the data. These analyses are very computationally
demanding and thus intermediate and output data products have been
provided.