Journal — Pollen Record

The pollen record is retrieved from land. Soil is collected from "today" back 10,000 years, just after the glaciers retreated. It isn't worth collecting samples below glacial till because it's likely that soil has been churned, and no longer sits in the correct, reverse chronological, order. The soil can be collected through a number of methods depending on the environment. As there are no naturally occurring (long-running) lakes on Dartmoor, core samples need to be taken from mechanical boring, or from cuts in the land (e.g., from streams, or dug holes). The samples of soil are processed in a lab,...

Key findings Not everything in the record was definitely there. For example, pine trees have highly mobile pollen and can sometimes be overrepresented in the pollen record. Not everything absent from the pollen record was absent on the ground. For example, insect-pollinated plants are often absent, or under-represented in the pollen record. The most important data you can collect is direct observation. Evidence in the Dartmoor pollen record It was amazing how many little nuances I bumped into when I was reading the research papers. For example, one of the first reports from the 1960s identified pollen from pine trees...