Pollen record of a sediment core from the Neualbenreuth Maar, Germany

The Neualbenreuth Maar (49°58' N, 12°28' E, 601 m asl) is a filled up former maar lake, located within a presently swampy depression 2.5 km ESE of the village Neualbenreuth (NE-Bavaria, Germany). It represents one of four hitherto known volcanic structures of Pleistocene age along the NNW-SSE trending Tachov fault zone. The maar structure was detected by gravity surveys and was subsequently confirmed by the recovery of lake sediments by an exploratory drilling campaign in 2015. Within the scope of a pilot study, a set of 141 pollen samples collected from sediment depths between 17.7 to 96.0 m below the recent surface. The samples were analyzed in order to evaluate the potential of the sequence for detailed palaeoenvironmental investigations, and to estimate the age of the sedimentary record. The pollen analyses from the Neualbenreuth Maar sediments reveal a continuous record of vegetation and climate changes encompassing four interglacial stages and five cold periods. The dominance of cold and dry tolerant herbs and the sparse representation trees and shrubs during most parts of the sequence indicates open landscapes of steppe to woody-steppe character typically of late Middle and Late Pleistocene glacial periods in Central Europe. The pollen assemblages of the warm stage in the upper part of the core clearly support its correlation with the Eemian interglacial (MIS 5e). The three pre-Eemian warm stages represent terrestrial analogues of the marine isotope stages (MIS) 7e, 7c, and 7a within the Saalian glacial period. In Central Europe, which was strongly affected by glacial and periglacial processes during the major Middle and Late Pleistocene cold periods, palaeoecological evidence of the Saalian complex of alternating warm and cold stages is ambiguous so far. The Neualbenreuth record provides the first biostratigraphical sequence from this region covering MIS 8 to 5 without notable depositional gaps