The SPECIAL EPD Database: an expanded resource to document changes in vegetation and climate from pollen records from Europe, the Middle East and western Eurasia

Past changes in vegetation can be reconstructed with pollen records from sedimentary archives to make quantitative reconstructions of climate variables. The SPECIAL-EPD is an expanded database of pollen records from Europe, the Middle East and western Eurasia. It is based on data from public data repositories, a pollen compilation spanning the Middle East, and data supplied by the original authors for the Iberian peninsula and other regions. There has been thorough quality control applied to the data, and errors have been fixed and recorded.
New BACON Bayesian age models, based on the recalibration of radiocarbon ages using INTCAL2020 are provided for all the records. The pollen records have been taxonomically harmonised and the counts at this level are provided in the "clean" table. They have then been standardised at two further levels: one provides taxonomically harmonised counts at species level for woody plants and genus level for other plants ("intermediate" table); the second provides a further amalgamation of rare taxa into higher taxonomic groups (genus, sub-family, family as appropriate), after ensuring that this was consistent with their distribution in climate space ("amalgamated" table).
The SPECIAL-EPD database now contains 1758 entities from 1576 sites. New age models have been run for 1598 for the entities in total.