Lake-level changes and fire history at Lagunillo del Tejo (Spain) during the last millennium: Climate or humans?

Hydroclimatic variability is expected to be affected by global warming in the Mediterranean region where climate, fire and human activities are known to be interdependent. The latter is examined here for the past millennium by studying paleoenvironmental indicators from a sedimentary sequence at Lagunillo del Tejo (Cuenca, central Spain). Inferred changes in fire activity and lake levels are based on records of macrocharcoals and plant/algal macrofossils, respectively, and are compared with independent information on climate change and socio-economical transformations from historical and meteorological records. The results show that there is an obvious climatic forcing behind the lake-leve…

Fire history in southern Sweden during the past 11500 years: relationships with climate and human impact and the role of fire in forest dynamics

Holocene land-cover reconstructions for studies on land cover-climate feedbacks

The major objectives of this paper are: (1) to review the pros and cons of the scenarios of past anthropogenic land cover change (ALCC) developed during the last ten years, (2) to discuss issues related to pollen-based reconstruction of the past land-cover and introduce a new method, REVEALS (Regional Estimates of VEgetation Abundance from Large Sites), to infer long-term records of past land-cover from pollen data, (3) to present a new project (LANDCLIM: LAND cover – CLIMate interactions in NW Europe during the Holocene) currently underway, and show preliminary results of REVEALS reconstructions of the regional land-cover in the Czech Republic for five selected time windows of the Holocene…

Regional climate model simulations for Europe at 6 and 0.2 k BP: sensitivity to changes in anthropogenic deforestation

International audience; This study aims to evaluate the direct effects of anthropogenic deforestation on simulated climate at two contrasting periods in the Holocene, ∼ 6 and ∼ 0.2 k BP in Eu-rope. We apply the Rossby Centre regional climate model RCA3, a regional climate model with 50 km spatial resolution, for both time periods, considering three alternative descriptions of the past vegetation: (i) potential natural vegetation (V) simulated by the dynamic vegetation model LPJ-GUESS, (ii) potential vegetation with anthro-pogenic land use (deforestation) from the HYDE3.1 (History Database of the Global Environment) scenario (V + H3.1), and (iii) potential vegetation with anthropogenic land …

First pollen-based REVEALS reconstruction of vegetation abundance in Europe for five time windows between 6k years BP and present

The submitted dataset includes the pollen-based REVEALS estimates of 11 plant functional types (PFTs) and 3 land-cover types (LCTs) for Europe, published in Trondman et al. (2015) as part of the results from the Swedish project LandClim I (Gaillard et al., 2010). In this project, pollen-based REVEALS estimates of land cover for 5 time windows of the Holocene were used to evaluate the scenarios of anthropogenic land-cover change (ALCC) KK and HYDE (Kaplan et al., 2017) and to study the biogeophysical forcing of ALCC between the time windows 6200-5700 years BP and CE 1600-1850 (Strandberg et al., 2014). The reconstruction is based on 25 pollen taxa for which pollen productivity of the corresp…