The Pleistocene mammalian forest dwellers in monsoon dominated provinces of China as forest dynamics proxies

Monsoon has an important impact on the development of vegetation that subsequently has significant influence on the evolution of plant consumers. The diversities of forest dwellers or herbivores follow the evolution of the vegetation, and it is therefore possible to take such diversities as forest or vegetation dynamic proxies. The present work selected 36 Pleistocene faunas of large mammals from monsoon-dominated provinces in China as materials and calculated the diversities of forest dwellers and herbivores with different approaches, as well as the consensus gradient coefficients of all the selected faunas in different flora regionalized subkingdoms. The results show that with the evolution and transitions of the East Asian summer and winter monsoon intensities, the forest vitality decreased while steppe vitality increased gradually in a fluctuated way from the Early Pleistocene to the Late Pleistocene, especially in the provinces north of the Qinling-Huaihe Line. The analyses of such diversities of the faunas can help to determine the forest dynamic proxies. Moreover, the correlation of such proxies to loess-paleosol sequences and marine isotope stages can in turn help to improve the accuracy of dating fauna ages and paleoenvironment reconstruction.