HORIZON EUROPA PALOMA Project: A paleoenvironmental investigation of the sensitivity of the Amazon lowlands to climate drivers using pollen-based modeling approaches

The Amazon is one of the world's most biodiverse ecosystems and our largest carbon sink, but human activity and climate change pose serious threats to its existence. We are still a long way from understanding how sensitive Amazonian plants really are to variations in temperature and precipitation. One way to understand this is by looking at fossil pollen accumulated over thousands of years, which can be used to reconstruct what the forests looked like over time and how they changed.

In the context of Amazonia, there has been no way to connect changes in pollen assemblages with climate events until now because the forests in this region are diverse and many areas respond differently to environmental factors, and there is insufficient data to allow comparisons between sites. To understand the sensitivity of Amazonia to climate change, we aim to use pollen-based models to reconstruct changes in temperature, precipitation, and seasonality in the lowlands of Ecuador and Peru. This will be achieved by collecting modern pollen samples and compiling other existing datasets from collaborators, as well as modern climate data retrieved from weather stations.

We will use these datasets to calibrate key existing fossil pollen records from the region, thus enabling the reconstruction of paleoclimatic parameters through the use of transfer functions. By enhancing our modern pollen database for the Amazon lowlands and applying new modeling techniques, we aim to provide new insights into ecological tipping points, plant responses to abrupt changes, effects on population abundance and structure, and time lags in response to climate.