Quantitative Reconstruction of Precipitation and Its Impact on Vegetation during the Younger Dryas: Evidence from Pollen and Climate Simulation

This integrated dataset originates from a peat sediment core retrieved from Zhaogongting in southern Hunan Province, China. It comprises five key categories of paleoenvironmental proxies: Pollen percentage data, detailing the relative abundance of terrestrial and wetland taxa; Quantitative precipitation reconstructions (including mean annual, summer, and winter precipitation) derived using Modern Analogue Technique (MAT) and Weighted Averaging Partial Least Squares (WAPLS) regression; Floristic richness indices (pollen taxon richness, evenness, and Shannon-Wiener diversity) calculated from terrestrial pollen counts; Rate of vegetation change quantified using Bray-Curtis dissimilarity within a moving-window approach; Climate simulation outputs from the TraCE-21ka experiment, highlighting moisture responses during the Younger Dryas period. Together, these data provide a high-resolution record of vegetation dynamics, hydroclimate variability, and ecological responses in subtropical China during the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene (ca. 13.1–8.6 ka BP).