Quantifying the effects of land use and climate on Holocene vegetation in Europe

Abstract

Human impact Land use LPJ-GUESS Europe Pollen REVEALS Vegetation composition based REVEALS estimates with climate-driven dynamic vegetation modelling results. The overall results indicate that climate is the major driver of vegetation when the Holocene is considered as a whole and at the sub-continental scale, although land use is important regionally. Four critical phases of land-use effects on vegetation are identified. The first phase (from 7000 to 6500 BP) corresponds to the early impacts on vegetation of farming and Neolithic forest clearance and to the dominance of climate as a driver of vegetation change. During the second phase (from 4500 to 4000 BP), land use becomes a major control of vegetation. Climate is still the principal driver, although its influence decreases gradually. The third phase (from 2000 to 1500 BP) is characterised by the continued role of climate on vegetation as a consequence of late-Holocene climate shifts and specific climate events that influence vegetation as well as land use. The last phase (from 500 to 350 BP) shows an acceleration of vegetation changes, in particular during the last century, caused by new farming practices and forestry in response to population growth and industrialization. This is a unique signature of anthropogenic impact within the Holocene but European vegetation remains climatically sensitive and thus may continue to respond to ongoing climate change.

Constraining the Deforestation History of Europe: Evaluation of Historical Land Use Scenarios with Pollen-Based Land Cover Reconstructions

“…While the theory for the quantitative reconstruction of land cover based on pollen records has existed for decades [42][43][44][45], large-scale reconstructions only became possible more recently with the development of computer programs [37,38,46], and the intensive field studies were needed to parameterize these models regionally [39,47,48]. The REVEALSmethod of quantitative pollen-based land cover reconstruction [37], has been applied in a number of regional studies in Europe [41,46,47,49] and in sub-continental syntheses for northwestern and northern Central Europe [40,50]. This large-scale synthesis provides, for the first time, an independent estimate of land cover at a spatial and temporal scale suitable for the evaluation of ALCC scenarios.…”

The role of climate, forest fires and human population size in Holocene vegetation dynamics in Fennoscandia

“…We used pollen records from 33 lakes selected from the European Pollen Database (Fyfe et al., ; Giesecke et al., ), the LANDCLIM pollen data archive (Marquer et al., ; Trondman et al., , ) or provided directly by data contributors (Appendix ). An important criterion for the selected pollen records was robust chronological control and adequate Holocene time resolution.…”

“…() and Marquer et al. () have addressed this question by means of variation partitioning, using different proxies to assess the role played by the anthropogenic influence. Reitalu et al.…”

“…() derived the human impact variable from pollen records, Marquer et al. () used the anthropogenic land‐cover change scenario (ALCC; Kaplan et al., ), while Kuosmanen et al. () utilized a human population size proxy, based on the temporal frequency distribution of radiocarbon‐dated archaeological findings (Lechterbeck et al., ; Woodbridge et al., ).…”

Untitled

“…the focus was on how the quantitative land-use and land-cover reconstructions achieved so far should be synthesized and formatted to be useful for (i) climate and dynamic vegetation modeling studies, and (ii) evaluation and improvement of scenarios of past anthropogenic land-cover change (ALCC 2. A comparison at a 1°x 1° grid spatial resolution and 500 years' time resolution over the last 8 ka between (i) the plant cover obtained from the transient runs presented by A. Dallmeyer and (ii) the plant cover obtained from pollen data using the REVEALs model (Marquer et al 2017). …”