Multi-method dynamical reconstruction of the ecological impact of copper mining on Chinese historical landscapes

Abstract

This study deals with the historical impacts of mining as a result of the economic development in Eastern Asia. It focuses on landscape changes caused by the emerging copper mining industry in China's south east provinces. Since the ecological aftermath has never been documented in Chinese history, a reconstruction of dynamic landscape processes is performed. A key region for this reconstruction are the mining areas in Yunnan province. This province was the most important supplying region of copper in China during the early and mid Qing dynasty (1725–1855).Predictive modeling of the primary vegetation in combination with dynamic agent-based reconstructions have been performed to analyze and to understand deforestation processes. Therefore a time-discrete balance between biomass removal and renewal has been carried out to characterize different periods of landscape degradation, biodiversity and agriculture. Besides the reconstruction, explanatory and experimental results have been compiled to assess the ecological impacts of mining during this period.An ‘Evaludation’ of the model was performed in order to verify the applied concepts and test the integration of data as well as the conclusive generation of results. Our calculations show that while deforestation for mining was severe in the 18th and 19th century, rising populations and agricultural reclamation had a bigger impact on the clearance of forests. In addition, quantitative data for the ecological succession show that deforestation was reduced by up to 75% due to the provision of regrowing biomass. Deforested areas around the mines were either completely destroyed or of high biodiversity due to the abundance of heterogenous vegetation communities within small spaces. Lastly, two extreme scenarios were calculated which covered all positive and negative triggers of deforestation. These calculations served as reference data to evaluate model's quality: our model outputs lie within the range of comparable studies but underestimate the total deforestation reported and yet some uncertainties regarding forest fires and other uses of biomass remain. This study has led to a more holistic understanding of the interactions between copper mining and landscape ecology in Chinese history.