Abstrakt
The Integrated Plant Record vegetation analysis serves as proxy method to derive major types of zonal palaeovegetation by the proportion of key components. The study follows three goals: (1) to present the calibration set of modern vegetation extended by the natural vegetation of Europe and Caucasus from the EuroVegMap database; (2) to introduce two tools ("DRUDGE 1" and "DRUDGE 2") to statistically determine the closest analogues of a fossil plant assemblage out of the calibration set of currently 448 modern vegetation units from Europe, Caucasus, China and Japan; (3) to test the threshold values of key components of the broad-leaved deciduous forest, mixed mesophytic forest, broad-leaved evergreen forest and subhumid sclerophyllous forest including their ecotones on modern European and Caucasian vegetation and define the new thresholds for more open (steppe) environments such as open woodland and xeric grassland.