TREE COVER AND DENTAL MICROWEAR: A RED DEER MODEL FOR DECIPHERING PALEOENVIRONMENTAL VARIATIONS.

Among others, dental microwear texture analysis (DMTA) is a proxy of dietary niches 1. Applied on herbivores, it allows to describe vegetal resources and assess environmental changes. However, up to now, there is no study correlating tooth microwear and tree cover. Here we propose to fill this gap by modelling this relation. As the diet of red deer (Cervus elaphus) varies from grass to browse depending on resource availabilities ², it is an ideal candidate to test such a model, which would be helpful in deciphering tree cover in the past. On the one hand, we created vector layers with QGIS for the habitats of nine European populations of extant wild-shot red deer 3 (N=283 adults). In each area, we randomly generated 5-km² circles assessing individual home ranges. We then superimposed these circular batches with the CORINE land Cover data (2018 update). DMTA was done using Scale-Sensitive Fractal Analysis 4 on the lower second molars of these deer. We found low pseudo-R² between DMTA and land cover when zooming in at the individual scale. At the population scale, we found that the textural fill volume is negatively correlated with the percentage of open habitats, wherein herbaceous dicots and monocots are more abundant than in forested habitats. Applied to early Pleistocene European cervids, notably the genus Eucladoceros, our results suggest similarities in tree cover between site of Chilhac with the forested area of Białowieża, Poland 5 and between the site of Senèze with the southern Iberic populations occupying open habitats 6. The land cover should be considered with caution, however. It does not directly reflect the preferred food resources of the red deer, but instead natural and agricultural landscapes, the categories of which need to be adapted to better address (palaeo)ecological issues. These preliminary results, however, provide interesting perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]