Abstract:Relationships between modern surface pollen and vegetation are essential for recovering past vegetation. In this paper, 39 sites covering various types of steppe in China were selected to study the relationships, at each sites, one surface soil sample was collected and vegetation investigations were carried out at the same time. The result shows that surface pollen assemblages reflect similar characteristics for all types of steppe vegetation in general. The percentages of arboreal pollen are less than 5% i...