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

**Authors**

Jonathan D. Gordon*, Brennen Fagan, Esther Githumbi, Nicky Milner, Chris D. Thomas,
*Corresponding author: [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail])

This work was funded by a Leverhulme Trust Research Centre - The Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity (grant number: RC-2018-021). Any queries should be sent to the corresponding author.

## Project description

The majority of the analysis scripts for the manuscript *'Increased Holocene diversity in Europe linked to human-associated vegetation change'* were run on the University of York's High Performance Computing cluster, Viking2.
Without using computing resources such as these, the computational time required to run these analyses in full is intractable, though the user may run the scripts in this folder on a reduced number of pollen records, with a reduced number of resamples. Alternatively, interme...,