In 1994, Vera Markgraf at the University of Colorado (USA) started an open database of Latin American pollen data. During the period between 1998 and 2003, management of the LAPD was based at the University of Amsterdam, where Robert Marchant served as coordinator and additional support was provided by Juan Carlos Berrío.
Among numerous papers by Marchant and collaborators two are key for this paper:
- Synthesis of the distribution and ecology of taxa in the LAPD (Marchant et al., 2002), and
- Pollen based biome reconstructions for Latin America (Marchant et al., 2009).
Marchant, R., Almeida, L., Behling, H., Berrío, J. C., Bush, M., Cleef, A., Duivenvoorden, J., Kappelle, M., De Oliveira, P., Teixeira de Oliveira-Filho, A., Lozano-García, S., Hooghiemstra, H., Ledru, M. P., Ludlow-Wiechers, B., Markgraf, V., Mancini, V., Paez, M., Prieto, A., Rangel, O. and Salgado-Labouriau, M. L.: Distribution and ecology of parent taxa of pollen lodged within the Latin American Pollen Database, Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology, 121(1), 1–75, 2002.
Marchant, R., Cleef, A., Harrison, S. P., Hooghiemstra, H., Markgraf, V., Van Boxel, J. H., Ager, T., Almeida, L., Anderson, R., Baied, C., Behling, H., Berrio, J. C., Burbridge, R., Björck, S., Byrne, R., Bush, M. B., Duivenvoorden, J., Flenley, J., De Oliveira, P. E., Van Geel, B., Graf, K., Gosling, W. D., Harbele, S., Van der Hammen, T., Hansen, B., Horn, S., Kuhry, P., Ledru, M.-P., Mayle, F. E., Leyden, B., Lozano-García, S., Melief, A. M., Moreno, P., Moar, N. T., Prieto, A., Van Reenen, G., Salgado-Labouriau, M. L., Schäbitz, F., Schreve-Brinkman, E. and Wille, M.: Pollen-based biome reconstructions for Latin America at 0, 6000 and 18 000 radiocarbon years ago, Climate of the Past, (5), 725–767, 2009. Open Access.
The 2003 version of the LAPD in Amsterdam ultimately incorporated about 500 pollen sites, including data from cores, archeological, cave and alluvial sites and surface samples and sites from Central America, the Caribbean, and South America.
In 2009, the group of Palaeoecology & Landscape Ecology (IBED-P&L) from the University of Amsterdam decided to update the LAPD site inventory again with help of three consecutive years of research grant from the Hugo de Vries Fonds. At that time based in Colombia, the master student Suzette Flantua updated the list of the pollen records throughout Latin America and this list was recently published open access in Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology:
Flantua, S. G. A., Hooghiemstra, H., Grimm, E. C., Behling, H., Bush, M. B., González-Arango, C., Gosling, W. D., Ledru, M.-P., Lozano-García, S., Maldonado, A., Prieto, A. R., Rull, V. and Van Boxel, J. H.: Updated site compilation of the Latin American Pollen Database, Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology, 223, 104–115, doi:10.1016/j.revpalbo.2015.09.008, 2015. Open access + Interactive map viewer.
After this publication, additional papers have been published using the collected LAPD metadata, both of which are also open access:
Flantua, S. G. A., Hooghiemstra, H., Vuille, M., Behling, H., Carson, J. F., Gosling, W. D., Hoyos, I., Ledru, M. P., Montoya, E., Mayle, F., Maldonado, A., Rull, V., Tonello, M. S., Whitney, B. S. and González-Arango, C.: Climate variability and human impact in South America during the last 2000 years: synthesis and perspectives from pollen records, Clim. Past, 2016. link
Flantua, S.G.A., Blaauw, M. and Hooghiemstra, H.: 2016. Geochronological database and classification system for age uncertainties in Neotropical pollen records, Clim. Past, 2016. link
Our intention is to use Neotoma as the database where raw pollen counts can become available while the current website aims to provide the most updated overview of pollen records in the Neotropics.