Abstract
Identifying refugia can provide important insights for conservationists planning protected areas. However, most current methods for identifying refugia emphasize short-term survivorship during a crisis rather than long-term recovery. Here, we propose a method for identifying refugia that emphasizes range re-expansion, and we present a case study using pollen data from three plant taxa over the past 20 kyr in northern Alaska, USA to evaluate the method’s validity. We identified a substantial decrease and subsequent recovery in spruce presence across the study region between 16.0–11.0 ka and tested the pattern’s significance using a Monte Carlo analysis. During this interval of relatively warm and dry regional climate, spruce persisted in one locality that acted as a source for post-crisis re-expansion, indicating that this locality was a refugium. Using this method to understand how successful refugia form in different crises would provide conservationists with more informative guidelines for planning protected areas.
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Acknowledgements
Data were procured from the Neotoma Paleoecology Database (http://www.neotomadb.org) and its constituent North American Pollen Database. The work of data contributors, data stewards, and the Neotoma community is gratefully acknowledged. The authors would like to thank Sidharth Srinivasan for assistance with programming and Kelsey Poloney (University of Alberta) for assistance with data curation. The authors would also like to thank Alexander Baxter, Amy Cameron, Galadriel Tremaine, Fatima Iftikhar, William Johnston-Gramlich, Zach Juurlink, Sam Nicol, Henry Sharpe, and Jordan Stock (University of Alberta) for improving this project with their valuable insight and discussion. Finally, the authors would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for providing feedback on this manuscript. NEDM discloses support for the research of this work from the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) [Undergraduate Student Research Award and Canada Graduate Scholarships–Master’s program]; the Government of Alberta, Canada [Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholarship]; and the North American Paleontological Convention [STRATA grant]. CS discloses support for the research of this work from NSERC [Discovery Grants RGPIN–2017–06246 and RGPIN–2023–04916]. LRL discloses support for the research and publication of this work from NSERC [Discovery Grant RGPIN–2021–02744]. CLS and JFC declare no relevant funding.
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Morley, N.E.D., Schneider, C.L., Cahill, J.F. et al. Geohistorical data reveal an ice age refugium with implications for modern conservation. Commun Earth Environ (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-026-03563-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-026-03563-3
