Lack of evidence for alternative stable states in Northern Hemisphere forests during the past 8 ka

Abstract With increased pressure from anthropogenic climate change, boreal forests are suspected to be approaching tipping points which could cause large-scale changes in tree cover and affect global climatic feedback. However, evidence for this proposed tipping is sparse and relies heavily on observations on short time scales from remote sensing data and space-for-time substitutions. Here we make use of an extensive pollen data set including 239 records of large lakes to investigate the existence of alternative stable forest cover states in the boreal forest and its adjacent biomes during the last 8000 years. By using a multimodality measure on time series of reconstructed tree cover we find very little multimodality in pollen data. To test whether this lack of multimodality is caused by limitations in the paleo data set we perform surrogate experiments. Surrogate data with alternative stable states based on the paleo vegetation–climate relationship were generated and significant multimodality was found more often than for the pollen-based tree cover (24.7% and 5.3% respectively). The response of tree cover to climate may, therefore, be more gradual and not as abrupt as would be expected from remote sensing analyses on stability. The apparent alternative stability hypothesized in the analyses of climate–vegetation relationships could be due to the strong spatial heterogeneity of environmental factors and vegetation responses as an artifact of space-for-time substitutions. Even though current and upcoming shifts in the boreal forest are indisputable and a reason for strong concern, these changes could happen gradually without going through large-scale tipping between alternative stable states. To aid adaptation and conservation measures, more knowledge is needed about boreal forest drivers and their spatial heterogeneity.