What are the potential applications of pollen analysis in agriculture and forestry?
Pollen can be used to determine pollination mechanisms, foraging resources, migration routes and source zones of insects and other pollinators. It provides a means for pale environmental analyses of terrestrial rocks and is of interest to geologists. Pollen, looking like insignificant yellow dust, bears a plant's male sex cells and is a vital link in the reproductive cycle. With adequate pollination, wildflowers: Reproduce and produce enough seeds for dispersal and propagation. Maintain genetic diversity within a population. Three-fourths of the world's flowering plants and about 35 percent of the world's food crops depend on animal pollinators to reproduce. That's one out of every three bites of food you eat. More than 3,500 species of native bees help increase crop yields. Not only can pollen records tell us about the past climate, but they can also tell us how we are impacting our climate. By analyzing pollen from well-dated sediment cores, pale climatologists can obtain records of changes in vegetation going back hundreds of thousands, and even millions of years. Because there is a lot of pollen and it doesn't fall apart easily, it is often preserved in layers of sediments and can become fossilized within rocks even in places where other plants and animals are not likely to be preserved as fossils. This makes pollen a good source of data about past climates. Seeds and pollen allowed plants to reproduce in absence of water. This allowed them to expand their range onto dry land and to survive drought conditions. Pollen grains are found in many sediments and can be used to infer which plants existed at a certain time and their geographical distribution. Since plants types vary under different climate conditions, this distribution of pollen can be used to infer the climate type for that location at that time.
@ Naira, for more details you may go through the book " Pollen Analysis"
Author(s) : Moore, P. D. ; Webb, J. A. ; Collison, M. E.
Book : Pollen analysis. 1991 pp.viii + 216 pp.
ISBN : 9780632021765
Record Number : 19960200607
Publisher : Blackwell Scientific Publications
Location of publication : Oxford
Country of publication : UK
Language of text : English
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