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Palaeoenvironments and former climates are typically inferred from pollen and macrofossil records. This approach is time‐consuming and suffers from low taxonomic resolution and biased taxon sampling. Here, we test an alternative DNA‐based approach utilizing the P6 loop in the chloroplast trnL (UAA) intron; a short (13–158 bp) and variable region with highly conserved flanking sequences. For taxonomic reference, a whole trnL intron sequence database was constructed from recently collected material of 842 species, representing all widespread and/or ecologically important taxa of the species‐poor arctic flora. The P6 loop alone allowed identification of all families, most genera (>75%) and one‐third of the species, thus providing much higher taxonomic resolution than pollen records. The suitability of the P6 loop for analysis of samples containing degraded ancient DNA from a mixture of species is …