Historical ecology reveals landscape transformation coincident with cultural development in central Italy since the Roman Period

Abstract

Knowledge of the direct role humans have had in changing the landscape requires the perspective of historical and archaeological sources, as well as climatic and ecologic processes, when interpreting paleoecological records. People directly impact land at the local scale and land use decisions are strongly influenced by local sociopolitical priorities that change through time. A complete picture of the potential drivers of past environmental change must include a detailed and integrated analysis of evolving sociopolitical priorities, climatic change and ecological processes. However, there are surprisingly few localities that possess high-quality historical, archeological and high-resolution paleoecologic datasets. We present a high resolution 2700-year pollen record from central Italy and interpret it in relation to archival documents and archaeological data to reconstruct the relationship between changing sociopolitical conditions, and their effect on the landscape. We found that: (1) abrupt environmental change was more closely linked to sociopolitical and demographic transformation than climate change; (2) landscape changes reflected the new sociopolitical priorities and persisted until the sociopolitical conditions shifted; (3) reorganization of new plant communities was very rapid, on the order of decades not centuries; and (4) legacies of forest management adopted by earlier societies continue to influence ecosystem services today.

Geographical adaptation prevails over species‐specific determinism in trees’ vulnerability to climate change at Mediterranean rear‐edge forests

“…It should also be taken into consideration that current low‐altitudinal limits of species’ distribution might be located above the natural altitudinal limits (i.e., cooler temperature and higher precipitation), and therefore, less climatically constrained since past land use and silvicultural activities have altered natural species distribution (Colombaroli et al, ; Silva, Badeau, Legay, Corcket, & Dupouey, ; Tilman & Lehman, ). Indeed, historical changes in forests’ distribution and composition in central Italy were strongly driven by human socio‐political decisions, having severe impacts on meso‐hygrophilous forest types (Mensing et al, ; Piovesan, Mercuri, & Mensing & A. S, ).…”

Long‐term changes in Italian mountain forests detected by resurvey of historical vegetation data

“…1. On the one hand, the cessation of many forest practices is leading to the loss of cultural forest landscapes that were part of traditional agro-silviculture land-use systems (Mensing et al, 2018), with consequent loss of the associated biodiversity (Kraus and Krumm, 2013;Mölder, Streit, and Schmidt, 2014;Müllerová, Hédl, and Szabó, 2015). In our study area, this is the case with coppice stands (Müllerová, Hédl and Szabó, 2015), and chestnut grooves that were dominant landscape features as in other regions of the southern European mountains (Gondard et al, 2001;Pezzi, Maresi, Conedera, and Ferrari, 2011) 2.…”

Influences of Native American land use on the Colonial Euro-American settlement of the South Carolina Piedmont

“…Other examples highlighting the coevolution of landscape and society focus on places with demographic, if not cultural, continuity [ 14 , 101 ]. Here, we suggest that the ecological legacies of Native Americans were significant and were generalized enough to confer an advantage to a demographically and culturally unrelated population of Euro-American settlers.…”

“…Long term ecological studies demonstrate that land use legacies influence processes and trajectories in complex, coupled social and ecological systems [ 7 , 10 – 13 ]. In Europe, where intensive agricultural land use has been practiced for millennia, the ubiquity of land use legacies is well established [ 14 – 17 ]. On a much smaller scale, ecologically significant land use legacies have been detected in South America [ 18 – 20 ] and in Mexico and Central America [ 21 , 22 ].…”