Pollen data were obtained from the European Pollen Database (EPD, www.europeanpollendatabase.net), from PANGAEA (www.pangaea.de/) or provided by the authors (as indicated). Non-pollen palynomorphs (e.g. fungi, algae), introduced species, and fire-insensitive plants (e.g. obligate aquatics) were removed from the assemblages before analysis. Some pollen taxa are not identified consistently by palynologists or occur at very few sites, so some pollen types were amalgamated to higher taxonomic groups (mostly genera for trees, families for herbaceous taxa) for consistency across the records. This amalgamation was done in order to create a data set that was compatible with the SPECIAL Modern Pollen Database (Harrison, 2019), which is used as a training data set for climate reconstructions. Charcoal data were obtained from the Global Charcoal Database (Power et al., 2010; Marlon et al., 2016) or provided by the original authors (as indicated). New age models were created for both the pollen and the charcoal records using the IntCal20 calibration curve (Reimer et al., 2020) and the BACON Bayesian age-modelling tool in the rbacon package (2.5.0) in CRAN (Blaauw and Christeny, 2011) with the help of ageR package (Villegas-Diaz et al., 2021).