Finding the magnitude of human-induced Northern Hemisphere land-cover transformation between 6 and 0.2 ka BP

Andria Dawson,Jw Williams,Simon Goring ,Ralph Fyfe ,Ulrike Herzschuh ,Shintaro Sugita ,M C Edwards ,Qiao Xu ,F Li ,E Hopla,Michelle A Chaput ,Florence Mazier ,Konrad Gajewski ,Xian-An Cao ,Marie-José Gaillard

doi:10.22498/pages.26.1.34

Abstract

Finding the magnitude of human-induced Northern Hemisphere land-cover transformation between 6 and 0.2 ka BP

Highlights

A spatially explicit pollen-based reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere land cover suggests open land increases of 10 to 100% across large parts of the study area over the period 6 and 0.2 ka BP
The reported standard errors (SEs) account for component errors within the relative pollen-productivity estimates (RPPs) of the represented pollen taxa and the variation among pollen records used in the reconstruction (Sugita 2007)
REVEALS has been validated in several regions of Europe (e.g. Hellman et al 2008) and North America (Sugita et al 2010), i.e. pollen-based REVEALS estimates of plant cover based on modern pollen assemblages from surface lake deposits are comparable to plant cover inferred from satellite data, air photographs and vegetation inventories

Summary

Introduction

A spatially explicit pollen-based reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere land cover suggests open land increases of 10 to 100% across large parts of the study area over the period 6 and 0.2 ka BP. New generation vegetation reconstructions The PAGES LandCover6k working group (Gaillard et al, this issue) used established methods and comprehensive pollen and vegetation datasets to develop global Holocene (the last 11.5 millennia) reconstructions of land-use and land-cover change.

Results

Conclusion