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Abstract Pollen productivity estimates (PPEs) are fractionate values of relative pollen productivity, often in relation to Poaceae, that allow vegetation cover to be estimated from pollen counts. PPEs are especially used in the European and Chinese scientific community, with a few studies in North America. Here we present a comprehensive compilation of available PPE studies and their results arising from 40 publications with 49 sites and 99 taxa. This compilation allows scientists to identify the best PPE for their own studies and to identify data-gaps in need of further PPE analyses. We also present a taxonomically harmonised, unified PPE dataset, which we generated from the available studies. Studies which did not have Poaceae as reference taxon were not included unless they included taxa which would otherwise drop out of the dataset. The unified dataset is based on 30 publications and 34 sites, and gives the mean PPE per taxon excluding outliers as well as fall speeds, which are necessary to reconstruct vegetation cover from pollen counts and PPE values. It contains 58 PPEs and 57 fall speeds, with 54 taxa having values for both. This dataset can be applied to broad scale or long-term pollen-vegetation analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]