0000000000682727

AUTHOR

Ralph Fyfe

Prehistoric palaeodemographics and regional land cover change in eastern Iberia

Much attention has been placed on the drivers of vegetation change on the Iberian Peninsula. While climate plays a key role in determining the species pools within different regions and exerts a strong influence on broad vegetation patterning, the role of humans, particularly during prehistory, is less clear. The aim of this paper is to assess the influence of prehistoric population change on shaping vegetation patterns in eastern Iberia and the Balearic Islands between the start of the Neolithic and the late Bronze Age. In all, 3385 radiocarbon dates have been compiled across the study area to provide a palaeodemographic proxy (radiocarbon summed probability distributions (SPDs)). Modelled…

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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…

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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 …

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