Format: ORAL

Gabriela AMORS1, Victoria SNCHEZ-GINER1, Ariadna AMORS1, Juan OCHANDO2,1, Donatella MAGRI2, Manuel Munuera3, Juan Manuel JIMNEZ-ARENAS4, Ana Beln MARN-ARROYO5, Jos CARRIN1

1 University of Murcia, Spain 2 University La Sapienza, Rome, Italy 3 University Polytechnic of Cartagena, Spain 4 University of Granada, Granada, Spain 5 University of Cantabria, Santander, Spain

The importance of glacial plant refugia has been and continues to be a subject that sparks great intellectual excitement and promotes the development of many research activities specifically oriented towards biogeographic, ecological, evolutionary, and conservation biology issues, among others. These investigations aim to address an extensive spectrum of questions that lie on the frontiers of knowledge and have implications in a scenario of climate emergency and biodiversity crisis. It is crucial for society to be properly informed about the conclusions and corollaries arising from all these activities, mostly funded with public money. Scientific illustration and paleoart are essential tools in transmitting the knowledge acquired about refugia to different educational and cultural levels in each social context. Similarly, the pictorial representation, a result of synergy between the artist and paleoecological scientists, provides new avenues of research by highlighting biases, deficiencies, and methodological and interpretative inconsistencies in the study of paleoecosystems. In this poster, we present several paleoartistic proposals for representing glacial refugia in the Mediterranean Basin during the cold Quaternary stages, considering the originality of the depicted communities, the lack of current analogs, their probable landscape structure, and above all, the unique floristic components. The scientific data stem from palynological analyses complemented with other botanical remains and paleoclimatic inferences derived from non-botanical proxies. We put emphasis on hydroclimatic refugia in the driest territories and the evidences in support of these strongholds as reservoirs and sources of biodiversity which favoured the survival of hominins during periods of highly unfavorable climate across most of the European continent