Soil development and vegetation dynamics

How can soil development be traced? Pedology has a number of ways to derive the history of soil types, for example chronosequences but what methods does palaeoecology offer? 1. Indicator taxa: Iversen (1954, 1958), Gaillard (1984), Kuneš et al. (2011) and others used indicator taxa recorded as pollen and/or plant macrofossils interpreting a shift from pioneer taxa to late-successional taxa as largely indicating a development from raw soils to various types of mature soils. Conclusions on soil moisture can be drawn based on macroremains of indicator taxa (Birks, 2015). 2. Geochemistry of the sediment: independent of biostratigraphies certain elements of the sediment (Willis et al., 1997; Braun et al., 2005) or stable isotopes such as δ13C (Hammarlund et al., 1997) may indicate a shift in soil type. 3. Nitrogen-fixing taxa: Hippophaë and Alnus played a role, but see also Hu et al. (2001), Kuneš et al. (2011), Ammann et al. (2013)