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Updated: Jun 6, 2026

Using High Resolution Computed Tomography to Visualize the Three Dimensional Structure and Function of Plant Vasculature
Published on: April 5, 2013
Exploring vegetation in the fourth dimension
1Botany Department, School of Natural Sciences, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland. fraser.mitchell@tcd.ie
Abstract:
Much ecological research focuses on changes in vegetation on spatial scales from stands to landscapes; however, capturing data on vegetation change over relevant timescales remains a challenge. Pollen analysis offers unrivalled access to data with global coverage over long timescales. Robust techniques have now been developed that enable pollen data to be converted into vegetation data in terms of individual taxa, plant communities or biomes, with the possibility of deriving from those data a range of plant attributes and ecological indicators. In this review, I discuss how coupling pollen with macrofossil, charcoal and genetic data opens up the extensive pollen databases to investigation of the drivers of vegetation change over time and also provides extensive data sets for testing hypotheses with wide ecological relevance.
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