Abstract
Human land use legacies have significant and long-lasting ecological impacts across landscapes. Investigating ancient (>400 years) legacy effects can be problematic due to the difficulty in detecting specific, historic land uses, especially those hidden beneath dense canopies. Caracol, the largest (~200 km2) Maya archaeological site in Belize, was abandoned ca. A.D. 900, leaving behind myriad structures, causeways, and an extensive network of agricultural terraces that persist beneath the architecturally complex tropical forest canopy. Airborne LiDAR enables the detection of these below-canopy archaeological features while simultaneously providing a detailed record of the aboveground 3-dimensional canopy organization, which is indicative of a forest’s ecological function. Here, this remote sensing technology is used to determine the effects of ancient land use legacies on contemporary forest structure. Canopy morphology was assessed by extracting LiDAR point clouds (0.25 ha plots) from LiDAR-identified terraced (n = 150) and non-terraced (n = 150) areas on low (0°–10°), medium (10°–20°), and high (>20°) slopes. We calculated the average canopy height, canopy openness, and vertical diversity from the LiDAR returns, with topographic features (i.e., slope, elevation, and aspect) as covariates. Using a PerMANOVA procedure, we determined that forests growing on agricultural terraces exhibited significantly different canopy structure from those growing on non-terraced land. Terraces appear to mediate the effect of slope, resulting in less structural variation between slope and non-sloped land and yielding taller, more closed, more vertically diverse forests. These human land uses abandoned >1000 years ago continue to impact contemporary tropical rainforests having implications related to arboreal habitat and carbon storage.
Highlights
IntroductionOne interface between the disciplines of landscape archaeology and landscape ecology is the study of land use legacies
(10°–20°), and high (>20°) sloped areas. These results indicate that the terraces constructed by the Maya over 1000 years ago continue to influence the forest structure at Caracol
Agricultural terracing transforms hillslope topography; these oft-hidden archaeological features can last for millennia and are readily delineated with LiDAR [52,57,58]
Summary
One interface between the disciplines of landscape archaeology and landscape ecology is the study of land use legacies. Just as modern human societies alter landscapes, so did prior ones [3]. Land use history (e.g., forest clearing, agricultural regime, abandonment) directly influences both the biotic (e.g., presence of novel species assemblages) and abiotic (e.g., changes in soil nutrients, hydrology, topography) environments [4]. These changes may lead to long-term effects on contemporary measures of biodiversity (i.e., composition, structure, and function) that may impact current services (e.g., habitat, carbon sequestration) provided by the ecosystem (Figure 1)
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