Abstract
Anthropogenic land cover change (ALCC) is the most important transformation of the Earth system that occurred in the preindustrial Holocene, with implications for carbon, water and sediment cycles, biodiversity and the provision of ecosystem services and regional and global climate. For example, anthropogenic deforestation in preindustrial Eurasia may have led to feedbacks to the climate system: both biogeophysical, regionally amplifying winter cold and summer warm temperatures, and biogeochemical, stabilizing atmospheric CO 2 concentrations and thus influencing global climate. Quantification of these effects is difficult, however, because scenarios of anthropogenic land cover change over the Holocene vary widely, with increasing disagreement back in time. Because land cover change had such widespread ramifications for the Earth system, it is essential to assess current ALCC scenarios in light of observations and provide guidance on which models are most realistic. Here, we perform a systematic evaluation of two widely-used ALCC scenarios (KK10 and HYDE3.1) in northern and part of central Europe using an independent, pollen-based reconstruction of Holocene land cover (REVEALS). Considering that ALCC in Europe primarily resulted in deforestation, we compare modeled land use with the cover of non-forest vegetation inferred from the pollen data. Though neither land cover change scenario matches the pollen-based reconstructions precisely, KK10 correlates well with REVEALS at the country scale, while HYDE systematically underestimates land use with increasing magnitude with time in the past. Discrepancies between modeled and reconstructed land use are caused by a number of factors, including assumptions of per-capita land use and socio-cultural factors that cannot be predicted on the basis of the characteristics of the physical environment, including dietary preferences, long-distance trade, the location of urban areas and social organization.
Highlights
The domestication of plants and animals and the establishment of agro-pastoral societies in the Holocene led to the development of anthromes, i.e., landscapes distinguished by their climate, topography, hydrography and natural vegetation, and by land use [1]
We evaluated the quality of the REVEALS pollen-based reconstruction of landscape openness based on comparison to remote sensing-based maps of anthropogenic land use in the present day
Establishing that the REVEALS method does a reasonable job of representing present-day patterns of land cover, we use REVEALS reconstructions for the mid- and late-preindustrial Holocene to evaluate two differing anthropogenic land cover change (ALCC) scenarios: KK10 and HYDE
Summary
The domestication of plants and animals and the establishment of agro-pastoral societies in the Holocene led to the development of anthromes, i.e., landscapes distinguished by their climate, topography, hydrography and natural vegetation, and by land use [1]. More than half of the Earth’s land surface is covered by anthromes that are dominated by human activities [3]. How, when and where this transformation of land from systems largely controlled by climate, topography and other non-human factors to those dominated by anthropogenic management occurred is important [4]. Anthropogenic influences on the land further led to changes in geomorphology and sediment budgets [7,8], freshwater and marine ecosystems [9] and may have influenced regional and global climate [10]. The potential of the global land base to satisfy humanity’s future demands for food, water, energy and other ecosystem services will be affected by ongoing climate change [11], and by the history of land use [12] and feedbacks between land cover and the climate system [13,14]
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