Refugia are important oases of biodiversity conservation during periods of rapid and harsh climatic change. In this project, we aim at reconstructing the vegetation, disturbance and climate dynamics of the past 30,000 years at Lago della Costa, a refugial site in the Colli Euganei, a hilly landscape in Northern Italy close to the Adriatic Sea. The Colli Euganei are characterized by special climatic conditions (warmer winters, milder summers) if compared with the surrounding Po-Plain, allowing subtropical evergreen broadleaved species to thrive in biogeographically completely isolated semi-natural stands. Here, the pollen- and macrofossil inferred vegetation reconstructions from Lago della Costa are matched with multiproxy local paleoclimatic reconstructions (e.g. chironomids, ostracodes) to infer vegetational responses to climate and species survival.
