Pollen counts of sediment core MFM6

In recent years enormous success has been achieved in varve counting of the Eifel maar lakes, but a detailed correlation with the biostratigraphy has been missing. In this paper, we present new palynological results of the Lateglacial sequences from Holzmaar Lake and Meerfelder Maar Lake based on annually laminated sediments. In particular, the Meerfelder Maar has great potential, because, in contrast to the Holzmaar, the sequence between the Ulmener Maar Tephra (11 000 varve years BP) and the Laacher See Tephra (12 880 varve years BP) including the Younger Dryas is undisturbed and complete. Therefore, we currently use the Meerfelder Maar chronology (Brauer et al., 1999b) as an independent varve calendar for the biostratigraphy of the Lateglacial. The palynological signals of both maar lakes are in good agreement and can easily be correlated with one another and with type sections/type regions in northwestern Germany and Jutland. The sequences of the Eifel maar lakes have the quality of hypostratotypes with regional biozones based on an absolute time scale.

Pollen from 50 lake surface samples in Brandenburg, Germany, in 2009

Past changes in plant and landscape diversity can be evaluated through pollen analysis, however, pollen based diversity indexes are potentially biased by differential pollen production and deposition. Studies examining the relationship between pollen and landscape diversity are therefore needed. The aim of this study is to evaluate how different pollen based indexes capture aspects of landscape diversity. Pollen counts were obtained from surface samples of 50 small to medium sized lakes in Brandenburg (Northeast Germany) and compiled into two sets, with one containing all pollen counts from terrestrial plants and the second restricted to wind-pollinated taxa. Both sets were adjusted for the pollen production/dispersal bias using the REVEALS model. A high resolution biotope map was used to extract the density of total biotopes and different biotopes per area as parameters describing landscape diversity. In addition tree species diversity was obtained from forest inventory data. The Shannon index and the number of taxa in a sample of 10 pollen grains are highly correlated and provide a useful measure of pollen type diversity which corresponds best to landscape diversity within one km of the lake and the proportion of non-forested area within seven km. Adjustments of the pollen production/dispersal bias only slightly improve the relationships between pollen diversity and landscape diversity for the restricted dataset as well as for the forest inventory data and corresponding pollen types. Using rarefaction analysis, we propose the following convention: pollen type diversity is represented by the number of types in a small sample (low count e.g. 10), pollen type richness is the number of types in a large sample (high count e.g. 500) and pollen sample evenness is characterized by the ratio of the two. Synthesis. Pollen type diversity is a robust index that captures vegetation structure and landscape diversity. It is ideally suited for between site comparisons as it does not require high pollen counts. In concert with pollen type richness and evenness, it helps evaluating the effect of climate change and human land use on vegetation structure on long timescales.

Pollen profile Tegeler See, Brandenburg, Germany

The region D-s (Fig. 15.8) belongs to the Weichselian glaciated area of the North German lowlands and is a section of the older part of the young moraine landscape. The Warsaw-Berlin Urstromtal with the Spree River and the Havel lake-river system subdivide the region into four subregions, including a northern, southern and western ground moraine plateau. The region as a whole comprises the former West-Berlin, surrounded by the late GDR.

The broad spectrum of bioactive properties of phenolic extracts: a prospective study in three different plants

Natural resources like plants are currently used all over developed and under developed countries of the world as traditional home remedies and are promising agents for drug discovery as they play crucial role in traditional medicine. The use of plants for medicinal purpose usually varies from country to country and region to region because their use depends on the history, culture, philosophy and personal attitudes of the users (Ahmad et al., 2015). The use of plants and plant products as drugs predates the written human history (Hayta et al., 2014). Plants are a very important resource for traditional drugs and around 80% of the population of the planet use plants for the treatment of many diseases and traditional herbal medicine accounts for 30-50% of the total medicinal consumption in China. In North America, Europe and other well-developed regions over 50% of the population have used traditional preparations at least once (Dos Santos Reinaldo et al., 2015). Medicinal plants have been used over years for multiple purposes, and have increasingly attract the interest of researchers in order to evaluate their contribution to health maintenance and disease’s prevention (Murray, 2004). Recently between 50,000 and 70,000 species of plants are known and are being used in the development of modern drugs. Plants were the main therapeutic agents used by humans from the 19th century, and their role in medicine is always topical (Hayta et al., 2014). The studies of medicinal plants are rapidly increasing due to the search for new active molecules, and to improve the production of plants or bioactive molecules for the pharmaceutical industries (Rates, 2001). Several studies have been reported, but numerous active compounds directly responsible for the observed bioactive properties remain unknown, while in other cases the mechanism of action is not fully understood. According to the WHO 25% of all modern medicines including both western and traditional medicine have been extracted from plants, while 75% of new drugs against infective diseases that have arrived between 1981 and 2002 originated from natural sources, it was reported that the world market for herbal medicines stood at over US $60 billion per year and is growing steadily (Bedoya et al., 2009). Traditional medicine has an important economic impact in the 21st century as it is used worldwide, taking advantage on the low cost, accessibility, flexibility and diversity of medicinal plants (Balunas & Kinghorn, 2005).