"Mediterranean forest": towards a better definition for vegetation history

Palaeobotany and Archaeobotany deal with the reconstruction of flora and vegetation changes over long term time, and this is especially developed by pollen analysis (e.g. De Beaulieau et al. 2005; Jalut et al. 2009; Roberts et al. 2011; Sadori et al. 2014; Magri et al. 2015). Starting from detailed study of limited cases, wide-ranging issues overcome local events to improve knowledge on the cause-and-effect patterns which determined broad palaeoenvironmental events. Indeed, local studies are not only the basis for general reconstructions, but their synthesis can confirm, shape or even modify the current reference schemes of vegetation history. Reaching a coherent reconstruction from diverse reference sources basically requires reassembling different information within the same scheme, a very laborious job that hides many difficulties. One of the biggest difficulties is the inhomogeneity of terminology especially that concerning the references to the vegetation types. The studies of plant remains provide lists of plants that better deal with flora than with vegetation, but plant communities are relevant to landscape reconstruction and their names are commonly quoted in papers. However, several problems arise when these terms are used in a generic way or have different meaning according to the different botanists and palaeoecologists. Several of the most relevant cases where found related to the Mediterranean concept: climate, forest, flora and so on. This contribution, based on personal experiences, wants to focus on this problem, without making any claims to solve it. ... Dealing with multidisciplinary studies, the use of terms concerning the plant communities is of key importance in palynology applied to environmental reconstructions. This research wants to be a contribution to the use of a precise, common terminology in order to facilitate the legibility of the data and their use in the reconstruction of the vegetation history at large scale