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Extensive wetland development in mid-latitude North America during the Bølling–Allerød

Nature Geoscience volume 14, pages 30–35 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

Palaeoecological reconstructions of the American Midwest during the last deglaciation suggest the expansion of parkland biomes lacking modern analogues. Despite their spatial extent and persistence over several millennia, the landscape configuration and environmental drivers for the ‘no analogue’ biomes remain speculative. Here we use regression analysis linking settlement-era forest composition and wetland extent to identify specific trees and forest units strongly indicative of high wetland prevalence. We then recompile a regional pollen time series to show transient increases in these flood-tolerant trees, with prominent peaks during the Bølling–Allerød interstadial (~14.6–12.8 thousand years ago). Taken together, the pollen records, and analyses of settlement-era forest composition and wetland prevalence, suggest the establishment of extensive deglacial wetlands in the American Midwest (40–60% of land cover). This extensive, yet transient, wetland was possibly supported by southward discharge of Laurentide Ice Sheet meltwater during the Bølling–Allerød. The timing of this wetland expansion and its mid-latitude location have implications for deglacial methane source dynamics; our estimate of ~11 Tg yr−1 of methane is comparable to the northern source enhancement modelled from ice-core records. Regional decline of the Laurentide Ice Sheet meltwater discharge at the onset of the Younger Dryas (~12.8–11.7 thousand years ago) explains in part why these no-analogue wetland-rich parklands sharply declined, weakening this potential methane source.

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Fig. 1: No-analogue biomes in palaeoenvironmental context.
Fig. 2: Regression analysis to predict percentage wetland area from forest composition.
Fig. 3: Potential distribution of the two subregional wet forests.

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Data availability

All data for this study is previously published and mostly available via public repositories. The settlement-era tree composition datasets62,63 are available from the Environmental Data Initiative, including gridded compilation of data for Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and parts of Illinois and Indiana (https://doi.org/10.6073/pasta/aa0ef9828d41569a96651b056ad89fb3) and for the townships of Ohio (https://doi.org/10.6073/pasta/9df301adbfd619fa474e1041f0070c05), which the authors accessed through PalEON project website (http://paleonproject.org/). Water-table depth simulation results were published in ref. 46 and shared by contact with the first author. Time-series map images of North America biome reconstruction by ref. 15 were accessed via NOAA Paleo Data Search and are available to download at https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/study/5973 (ref. 54). Global peatland simulation by ref. 14 is available to download at https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1382 (ref. 55). Pollen datasets are available to view online using Neotoma Explorer at https://apps.neotomadb.org/explorer/ and to download by searching the web explorer as well as by using the ‘neotoma’ R package (https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=neotoma). The specific pollen records downloaded and analysed in this study are listed in Supplementary Table 1 in ascending order of the Neotoma assigned dataset ID. Source data for creation of Fig. 1c are available via the online versions of refs. 1,2,28,52 as supplementary tables.

Code availability

R scripts for reproducing plots and a more detailed step-by-step procedure for data acquisition, GIS analyses and machine-learning modelling are available in ref. 74 or by sending a request to E.B.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge funding for this research from the University of Toronto Centre for Global Change Science and the Connaught International Scholarship for Doctoral Students to E.B. and from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Canada) to S.A.F. and S.A.C. We thank the many contributors to the Neotoma database for making pollen datasets available for further analyses, and we thank Y. Fan for sharing the water-table depth simulation results.

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  1. Eunji Byun

    Present address: Ecohydrology Research Group, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

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  1. Department of Earth Sciences, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Eunji Byun, Hiromitsu Sato, Sharon A. Cowling & Sarah A. Finkelstein

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Contributions

E.B. conceived the study with guidance from S.A.F. and S.A.C.; E.B. obtained the datasets, performed the analyses and wrote the first draft of the manuscript with input from H.S and S.A.F. H.S. contributed to validation of methodology. S.A.F. contributed to writing of the final draft. All authors contributed to the interpretation of the results and contributed to revising and improving the text and figures.

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Correspondence to Eunji Byun or Sarah A. Finkelstein.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–15 and Tables 2–6.

Supplementary Table 1

List of Neotoma pollen records used in this study.

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Byun, E., Sato, H., Cowling, S.A. et al. Extensive wetland development in mid-latitude North America during the Bølling–Allerød. Nat. Geosci. 14, 30–35 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-020-00670-4

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