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Conventional pollen analysis records vegetational change at spatial and temporal scales unfamiliar to the plant ecologist. Forest succession, or the predictable replacement of one group of plant taxa by another, is usually perceived at the scale of the woodland stand during the lifetime of the ecologist, while conventional pollen data deal with areas of thousands of km² over time periods of thousands of years (Jacobson, this volume). Small hollows and other ‘closed-canopy’ sites, by contrast, record vegetational change over a few hundred m² and resolve vegetational changes of 10 years duration or less. These sites can record wind-throws and the local vegetational response to disturbance.