Artemisia pollen dataset for exploring the potential ecological indicators in deep time

To cover the maximum range of Artemisia pollen morphological variation, we provide a pollen dataset of 36 species from 9 clades and 3 outgroups of Artemisia constrained by the phylogenetic framework, containing 4018 original pollen photographs under LM and SEM, 7200 statistical data of pollen morphological traits, together with their 30858 source plant occurrences, and corresponding environmental factors. Here, we attempt to decipher the underlying causes of the long-standing disagreement in the palynological community on the correlation between Artemisia pollen and aridity by using this pollen dataset to recognize the different ecological implications of Artemisia pollen types.

The Artemisia pollen dataset as designed is open and expandable for new pollen data from Artemisia worldwide in order to better serve the global environment assessment and refined reconstruction of vegetation in the geological past.