The Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH) has taken part in a study published in Scientific Data presenting NAMPHORA, the most comprehensive database to date combining fossil and modern pollen records with plant functional traits, enabling more accurate reconstructions of North Africa’s climate and vegetation during the Holocene.

The study, led by Irene Solano of the University of Liverpool (UK) and involving CENIEH researcher Ignacio A. Lazagabaster, as well as Saúl Manzano Rodríguez, Associate Professor at the University of León, addresses one of the main challenges in palaeoecology: the fragmentation and lack of standardisation of existing datasets. NAMPHORA brings together 836 pollen records, 853 harmonised pollen types and 13 key plant functional traits, providing an unprecedented resource for analysing environmental change across North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Mediterranean region.

During the Holocene, particularly after the end of the African Humid Period around 5,500 years ago, this region underwent major climatic and vegetation changes. However, efforts to reconstruct these processes have long been hindered by the absence of integrated databases combining fossil and modern records. The new database overcomes this challenge by bringing together information from multiple sources, including scientific literature, unpublished datasets and major international repositories.

Large-scale analyses
One of the project’s most significant advances is the incorporation of plant functional traits, which help researchers understand how past plant communities responded to environmental change. This approach enables more robust palaeoecological reconstructions and contributes to a deeper understanding of the ecological and evolutionary processes that shaped present-day ecosystems.

The database has also been designed in an accessible, interoperable and reproducible format, compatible with programming tools such as R, allowing researchers to carry out large-scale analyses efficiently. All datasets and code are openly available, encouraging scientific collaboration and the continuous improvement of the resource.

“NAMPHORA will be essential for validating climate models and improving our ability to anticipate how ecosystems may respond to future global change scenarios, particularly in vulnerable regions such as North Africa,” says Ignacio A. Lazagabaster.

This work further strengthens CENIEH’s role in leading international research on climate change and ecosystem evolution, contributing to the development of innovative tools for studying past environmental change.