Investigating the dynamics of vegetation is an essential basis to know how to protect ecological environments and to help predict any changes in trend. Because of its fragile alpine ecosystem, the Tibetan Plateau is a particularly suitable area for studying vegetation changes and their driving factors. In this study, we present a high-resolution pollen record covering the last two centuries extracted from Gongzhu Co on the western Tibetan Plateau. Alpine steppe is the predominant vegetation type in the surrounding area throughout the past 250 years with stable vegetation composition and abundance, as revealed by pollen spectra dominated by Artemisia, Ranunculaceae, Cyperaceae, and Poaceae. Detrended canonical correspondence analysis (DCCA) of the pollen data reveals low turnover in compositional species (0.41 SD), suggesting that the vegetation in the Gongzhu catchment had no significant temporal change, despite climate change and population increases in recent decades. We additionally ran DCCA on ten other pollen records from the Tibetan Plateau with high temporal resolution (1–20 years) covering recent centuries, and the results also show that compositional species turnover (0.15–0.81 SD) is relatively low, suggesting that the vegetation stability may have prevailed across the Tibetan Plateau during recent centuries. More high-resolution pollen records and high taxonomic-resolution palaeo-vegetation records (such as sedaDNA), however, are needed to confirm the vegetation stability on the Tibetan Plateau.

研究植被动态是了解如何保护生态环境和帮助预测趋势变化的重要基础。青藏高原高山生态系统脆弱，是研究植被变化及其驱动因素的特别适宜的地区。在这项研究中，我们展示了从青藏高原西部的公主错提取的过去两个世纪的高分辨率花粉记录。高山草原是过去250年来周边地区的主要植被类型，植被组成和丰度稳定，花粉光谱显示以蒿科、毛茛科、莎草科和禾本科为主。花粉数据的去趋势典型对应分析（DCCA）显示组成物种的更新率较低（0.41 SD），这表明尽管近几十年来气候变化和人口增加，公主流域的植被没有显着的时间变化。我们还对青藏高原的其他十个花粉记录进行了 DCCA，这些记录涵盖了近几个世纪的高时间分辨率（1-20 年），结果还表明，组成物种更替（0.15-0.81 SD）相对较低，表明植被近几个世纪以来，青藏高原可能一直保持稳定。然而，需要更高分辨率的花粉记录和高分类分辨率的古植被记录（例如sedaDNA）来确认青藏高原植被的稳定性。