Quaternary paleoecology of the Lower Mississippi Valley

In 1938, Clair A. Brown published his classic paleobotanical discoveries from the Tunica Hills of southeastern Louisiana, indicating ice-age plant migrations of more than 1100 km. Brown collected fossils of both boreal trees such as white spruce (Picea glauca) and southern coastal plain plants from deposits mapped as the Port Hickey (Prairie) river terrace by Harold N. Fisk. Subsequent revisions of terrace mapping, radiocarbon dating, and paleoecological analysis reconciled Brownʹs conceptual and stratigraphic “mixing” of these two ecologically incompatible fossil plant groups. An older Terrace 2 (of Sangamonian to Altonian age) contains the warm-temperate assemblage. A younger Terrace 1 (of Farmdalian, Woodfordian, and Holocene age) includes full-glacial and late-glacial remains of both boreal and cool-temperate plants; and a warm-temperate suite of plants dates from the Holocene interglacial. New plant fossil localities with radiocarbon chronologies are now available from within the Lower Mississippi Valley of Missouri and Arkansas as well as from the adjacent Ozark Plateaus, the Interior Low Plateaus of Kentucky and Tennessee, and the bordering Blufflands of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana. These studies demonstrate that glacial and interglacial patterns of vegetation have been influenced by regional changes in climate, glacial runoff, and regime of the Mississippi River.