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A Comparison of late Quaternary Forest Changes in New Caledonia and Northeastern Australia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Janelle Stevenson  and
Geoffrey Hope
Janelle Stevenson
Affiliation:
Department of Archaeology and Natural History, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia
Geoffrey Hope
Affiliation:
Department of Archaeology and Natural History, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia
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Abstract

A pollen record from Lake Xere Wapo, southeast New Caledonia, is the longest continuous terrestrial record to be recovered from the tropical southwest Pacific and reveals a series of millennial scale changes in vegetation over the last ∼130,000 yr. A comparison of the Lake Xere Wapo record with the key northeast Australian record of Lynch's Crater reveals regional patterns of change. From ∼120,000 to ∼50,000 yr ago the vegetation around Lake Xere Wapo alternated between rainforest and maquis with fire an important disturbance factor. In the last 50,000 yr fire is almost absent from the record and the vegetation assumes a character unprecedented in the preceding 100,000 yr, dominated by Dacrydium and Podocarpus pollen. The most compelling aspect of the comparison with Lynch's Crater is that the much-discussed Araucaria decline at around 45,000 yr ago in northern Queensland is matched by a similar decline in the Lake Xere Wapo record.

Keywords

New CaledoniaPacificVegetation historyFire historyPollenAraucaria
Type
Special issue articles
Information
Quaternary Research , Volume 64 , Issue 3 , November 2005 , pp. 372 - 383
Copyright
University of Washington

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