Abstract
Spatially-explicit land cover land use change (LCLUC) models are becoming increasingly useful tools for historians and archaeologists. Such kinds of models have been developed and used by geographers, ecologists and land managers over the last few decades to carry out prospective scenarios. In this paper, we review historical models to compare them with prospective models, with the assumption that the ample experience gained in the development of models of prospective simulation can benefit the development of models having as their objective the simulation of changes that happened in the past. The review is divided into three sections: in the first section, we explain the functioning of contemporary LCLUC models; in the second section, we analyze historical LCLUC models; in the third section, we compare the former two types of models, and finally, we discuss the contributions to historical LCLUC models of contemporary LCLUC models.
Highlights
Human activities, such as logging, agriculture or fire management, cause changes in environmental attributes, including the quality and quantity of available resources, and directly or indirectly have an influence on the processes of desertification, loss of biodiversity, carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere and climatic change [1,2]
The review is divided into three sections: in the first section, we explain the functioning of contemporary land cover land use change (LCLUC) models; in the second section, we analyze historical LCLUC models; in the third section, we compare the former two types of models, and we discuss the contributions of historical LCLUC models to contemporary LCLUC models
We found a diversity of objectives for historical modeling: estimation of greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions derived from the development of agricultural areas [32,34,84]; knowing the agricultural production potential of areas in prehistoric times [7] and or representing socioeconomic processes during the onset of agriculture; analyzing the relation between land management and the processes of soil erosion and deposition [79]; reconstructing human activities, both at small and large scales, such as sedentarism, herding and hunting-gathering [17,64,70,76,77]; and modeling both the origins of sedentary life and of the first urban settlements, as the associated environmental impacts [40]
Summary
Human activities, such as logging, agriculture or fire management, cause changes in environmental attributes, including the quality and quantity of available resources, and directly or indirectly have an influence on the processes of desertification, loss of biodiversity, carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere and climatic change [1,2]. Published works simulate the LCLUC that took pace in the remote past, which in the present paper we designate as historical LCLUC models, in contrast to simulation models for more recent periods, which we here call contemporary LCLUC models Some of these publications focus on the assessment of deforestation rates and the emission of greenhouse gases (GHG) [32,33,34,35], while other. The review is divided into three sections: in the first section, we explain the functioning of contemporary LCLUC models; in the second section, we analyze historical LCLUC models; in the third section, we compare the former two types of models, and we discuss the contributions of historical LCLUC models to contemporary LCLUC models
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