1. The Nature of Long-Term Vegetational Change. - Long-term patterns and processes in forest communities. - Spatial and temporal scale. - Quaternary environmental changes as forcing functions. - Anthropogenic influences. - Models of stability and dynamics of forest communities. - Conclusions. - 2. Modern Pollen-Vegetation Relationships. - Production and dispersal of pollen grains. - Calibration of the relationship of modern pollen assemblages to extant forests. - The representation of temperate and boreal tree taxa in modern pollen samples and forest vegetation. - Conclusions. - 3. Reconstructing Long-Term Forest Changes From Fossil-Pollen Data. - Comparison of quantitative techniques for reconstruction of past vegetation. - A case study in comparison of taxon calibrations modern analogue techniques and simulation models as different approaches for quantifying past vegetation. - Generating late-Quaternary plant-ecological data sets. - Conclusions. - 4. Vegetation Map Patterns at the Biome Level. - Constructing paleogeographic maps. - Paleovegetation maps for eastern North America: 20000 yr B. P. to the present. - Patterns of paleoclimate inferred from maps of paleovegetation. - Conclusions. - 5. Tree Population Dynamics During the Past 20000 Years. - Population trajectories through time. - Contoured paleo-dominance maps for major tree taxa in eastern North America. - Conclusions. - 6. Late-Quaternary MIgrational Strategies of Tree Species. - Ecological areography. - Migrational strategies of tree taxa. - Late-Quaternary patterns and processes of migration. - Geographic and temporal variation in late-Quaternary migration rates. - Conclusions. - 7. The Role of Competition in Long-Term Forest Dynamics. - The ghost of competition past. - Use of pollen accumulation rates (PAR) for estimating changes in tree populations. - Black ash and hornbeam: A case study in late-glacial and early-Holocene competition. - Potential versus realized niches. - Conclusions. - 8. Gradient Analysis Ecotones and Forest Communities. - Direct gradient analysis. - DECORANA ordination of late-Quaternary ecoclines. - Conclusions. - 9. Quaternary Landscape Ecology. - Integration of pattern and process in vegetation climate and geomorphology. - Paleohydrology and Quaternary vegetation of the Interior Low Plateaus. - Quaternary landscape evolution in the southern Appalachian Mountains. - Landscape transformation in the deglaciated Great Lakes region. - Conclusions. - 10. Long-Term Forest Dynamics of the Temperate Zone. - Late-Quaternary vegetational and climatic history of Europe. - Late-Quaternary distributional histories of European tree genera. - Conclusions. - References. - List of late-Quaternary sites used in the FORMAP Project. Language: English