Anne Nielsen
Projektkoordinator
Europe's lost forests : A pollen-based synthesis for the last 11,000 years
Författare
Summary, in English
8000 years ago, prior to Neolithic agriculture, Europe was mostly a wooded continent. Since then, its forest cover has been progressively fragmented, so that today it covers less than half of Europe's land area, in many cases having been cleared to make way for fields and pasture-land. Establishing the origin of Europe's current, more open land-cover mosaic requires a long-term perspective, for which pollen analysis offers a key tool. In this study we utilise and compare three numerical approaches to transforming pollen data into past forest cover, drawing on >1000 14C-dated site records. All reconstructions highlight the different histories of the mixed temperate and the northern boreal forests, with the former declining progressively since ∼6000 years ago, linked to forest clearance for agriculture in later prehistory (especially in northwest Europe) and early historic times (e.g. in north central Europe). In contrast, extensive human impact on the needle-leaf forests of northern Europe only becomes detectable in the last two millennia and has left a larger area of forest in place. Forest loss has been a dominant feature of Europe's landscape ecology in the second half of the current interglacial, with consequences for carbon cycling, ecosystem functioning and biodiversity.
Avdelning/ar
- Institutionen för naturgeografi och ekosystemvetenskap
- BECC: Biodiversity and Ecosystem services in a Changing Climate
- MERGE: ModElling the Regional and Global Earth system
Publiceringsår
2018-12-01
Språk
Engelska
Publikation/Tidskrift/Serie
Scientific Reports
Volym
8
Issue
1
Dokumenttyp
Artikel i tidskrift
Förlag
Nature Publishing Group
Ämne
- Physical Geography
- Environmental Sciences related to Agriculture and Land-use
Status
Published
Projekt
- PAGES’ LandCover6k Working Group
ISBN/ISSN/Övrigt
- ISSN: 2045-2322