Trajectory analyses of past human land use as a tool to understand present terrestrial mammals' distribution

Apart from the known environmental factors influencing species distribution at the global scale, additional anthropogenic factors need to be considered in order to understand their current extents of occurrence. Namely, threatened species should particularly be influenced by human activities, since they are known to be in decline under their influence. The role of present human activities in modeling species distribution seems clear, but there is still a facet of land use that has not yet been sufficiently explored: land-use history. In the present work we show how to summarize overall land-use trajectories based on available data ranging from c.B.C.6000 to c.A.D.2000 by using a clustering …