Abstract
Plant communities are not stable over time and biological novelty is predicted to emerge due to climate change, the introduction of exotic species and land-use change. However, the rate at which this novelty may arise over longer time periods has so far received little attention. We reconstruct the emergence of novelty in Europe for a set of baseline conditions over the past 15000years to assess past rates of emergence and investigate underlying causes. The emergence of novelty is baseline specific and, during the early-Holocene, was mitigated by the rapid spread of plant taxa. Although novelty generally increases as a function of time, climate and human-induced landscape changes contributed to a non-linear post-glacial trajectory of novelty with jumps corresponding to periods of rapid changes. Emergence of novelty accelerated during the past 1000years. Historical cultural landscapes experienced a faster novelty development due to the contribution from anthropogenic land-cover changes.