Report on the Current Status of the EPD

(Rachid Cheddadi)

During the last year (1999) about 60 new sites have been collected and archived in the European Pollen Database. The number of sites presently available (March 2000) in the EPD is 922. Of these 153 are restricted and 769 unrestricted for use. Following EPD protocol, authors of restricted sites who have sent data to the EPD more than 3 years ago, have been contacted concerning the status of their sites. Several authors have replied and changed the status of their contributed sites from Restricted to Unrestricted which has allowed the EPD to contribute 120 new unrestricted sites to the scientific community (or public domain). The sites contributed during the past year are mainly from Austria, France, Spain and Mongolia. These new sites have occasioned the input of new taxa to the DB, thus increasing the number of EPD taxa to 2934. On the EPD taxa list there are 200 new taxa which still need to be checked by the taxonomy group. Work is in progress to transfer c.150 new French sites to the EPD so the magic 1000 site mark will probably be passed during 2000.

The number of 14C dates archived in the EPD is 2846 relevant to 46053 samples, which makes an average of 3 dates per coring in the DB. Dates are essential to establish reliable age/depth models for the pollen records. The number of records with an age/depth model is 500. There still remain more than 400 records without an age/depth correspondence. More than 100 chronologies have been developed and 15 new sites have been collected within the frame of two EU projects: OAK (ended in August 1999) and CYTOFOR (still running). The results of these two projects are part of a PhD thesis prepared by S. Brewer which should be defended in December 2000.