Consilience and palaeovegetation studies: why plant ecology needs the long-term past

Abstract

Ecological research increasingly addresses landscapes shaped by multiple interacting drivers, including climate change, land use, disturbance regimes, biological invasions and socio-economic transformations. This short perspective argues that consilience, understood as the convergence of independent lines of evidence, is essential for interpreting present-day vegetation and for designing future-oriented environmental policies. This short article is based on a conceptual synthesis of palaeoecology, plant ecology, historical ecology and landscape studies, with particular attention to pollen records and other palaeovegetation proxies. The main result is that modern plant communities cannot be adequately interpreted as static natural systems: they are historical configurations produced by long-term interactions among climate variability, species persistence, migration, extinction, disturbance and human management. Palaeovegetation records are therefore indispensable for defining dynamic baselines, identifying resilience thresholds, detecting land-use legacies and distinguishing natural variability from recent anthropogenic change. The main conclusion is that plant ecology and landscape reconstruction should systematically integrate long-term evidence. Past vegetation histories do not provide simple models to restore, but they define the range of ecological possibilities, constraints and risks within which future conservation, restoration and forest policies must operate.