Wetlands have long been drained for human use, thereby strongly affecting greenhouse gas fluxes, flood control, nutrient cycling and biodiversity
. Nevertheless, the global extent of natural wetland ...loss remains remarkably uncertain
. Here, we reconstruct the spatial distribution and timing of wetland loss through conversion to seven human land uses between 1700 and 2020, by combining national and subnational records of drainage and conversion with land-use maps and simulated wetland extents. We estimate that 3.4 million km
(confidence interval 2.9-3.8) of inland wetlands have been lost since 1700, primarily for conversion to croplands. This net loss of 21% (confidence interval 16-23%) of global wetland area is lower than that suggested previously by extrapolations of data disproportionately from high-loss regions. Wetland loss has been concentrated in Europe, the United States and China, and rapidly expanded during the mid-twentieth century. Our reconstruction elucidates the timing and land-use drivers of global wetland losses, providing an improved historical baseline to guide assessment of wetland loss impact on Earth system processes, conservation planning to protect remaining wetlands and prioritization of sites for wetland restoration
.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK, ZAGLJ
Humans have transformed Europe's landscapes since the establishment of the first agricultural societies in the mid-Holocene. The most important anthropogenic alteration of the natural environment was ...the clearing of forests to establish cropland and pasture, and the exploitation of forests for fuel wood and construction materials. While the archaeological and paleoecological record documents the time history of anthropogenic deforestation at numerous individual sites, to study the effect that prehistoric and preindustrial deforestation had on continental-scale carbon and water cycles we require spatially explicit maps of changing forest cover through time. Previous attempts to map preindustrial anthropogenic land use and land cover change addressed only the recent past, or relied on simplistic extrapolations of present day land use patterns to past conditions. In this study we created a very high resolution, annually resolved time series of anthropogenic deforestation in Europe over the past three millennia by 1) digitizing and synthesizing a database of population history for Europe and surrounding areas, 2) developing a model to simulate anthropogenic deforestation based on population density that handles technological progress, and 3) applying the database and model to a gridded dataset of land suitability for agriculture and pasture to simulate spatial and temporal trends in anthropogenic deforestation. Our model results provide reasonable estimations of deforestation in Europe when compared to historical accounts. We simulate extensive European deforestation at 1000 BC, implying that past attempts to quantify anthropogenic perturbation of the Holocene carbon cycle may have greatly underestimated early human impact on the climate system.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK
4.
Used planet: A global history Ellis, Erle C.; Kaplan, Jed O.; Fuller, Dorian Q. ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
05/2013, Volume:
110, Issue:
20
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Human use of land has transformed ecosystem pattern and process across most of the terrestrial biosphere, a global change often described as historically recent and potentially catastrophic for both ...humanity and the biosphere. Interdisciplinary paleoecological, archaeological, and historical studies challenge this view, indicating that land use has been extensive and sustained for millennia in some regions and that recent trends may represent as much a recovery as an acceleration. Here we synthesize recent scientific evidence and theory on the emergence, history, and future of land use as a process transforming the Earth System and use this to explain why relatively small human populations likely caused widespread and profound ecological changes more than 3,000 y ago, whereas the largest and wealthiest human populations in history are using less arable land per person every decade. Contrasting two spatially explicit global reconstructions of land-use history shows that reconstructions incorporating adaptive changes in land-use systems over time, including land-use intensification, offer a more spatially detailed and plausible assessment of our planet's history, with a biosphere and perhaps even climate long ago affected by humans. Although land-use processes are now shifting rapidly from historical patterns in both type and scale, integrative global land-use models that incorporate dynamic adaptations in human-environment relationships help to advance our understanding of both past and future land-use changes, including their sustainability and potential global effects.
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BFBNIB, NMLJ, NUK, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
Human land use activities have resulted in large changes to the biogeochemical and biophysical properties of the Earth's surface, with consequences for climate and other ecosystem services. In the ...future, land use activities are likely to expand and/or intensify further to meet growing demands for food, fiber, and energy. As part of the World Climate Research Program Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6), the international community has developed the next generation of advanced Earth system models (ESMs) to estimate the combined effects of human activities (e.g., land use and fossil fuel emissions) on the carbon–climate system. A new set of historical data based on the History of the Global Environment database (HYDE), and multiple alternative scenarios of the future (2015–2100) from Integrated Assessment Model (IAM) teams, is required as input for these models. With most ESM simulations for CMIP6 now completed, it is important to document the land use patterns used by those simulations. Here we present results from the Land-Use Harmonization 2 (LUH2) project, which smoothly connects updated historical reconstructions of land use with eight new future projections in the format required for ESMs. The harmonization strategy estimates the fractional land use patterns, underlying land use transitions, key agricultural management information, and resulting secondary lands annually, while minimizing the differences between the end of the historical reconstruction and IAM initial conditions and preserving changes depicted by the IAMs in the future. The new approach builds on a similar effort from CMIP5 and is now provided at higher resolution (0.25°×0.25°) over a longer time domain (850–2100, with extensions to 2300) with more detail (including multiple crop and pasture types and associated management practices) using more input datasets (including Landsat remote sensing data) and updated algorithms (wood harvest and shifting cultivation); it is assessed via a new diagnostic package. The new LUH2 products contain > 50 times the information content of the datasets used in CMIP5 and are designed to enable new and improved estimates of the combined effects of land use on the global carbon–climate system.
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IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
Climate variations influenced the agricultural productivity, health risk, and conflict level of preindustrial societies. Discrimination between environmental and anthropogenic impacts on past ...civilizations, however, remains difficult because of the paucity of high-resolution paleoclimatic evidence. We present tree ring—based reconstructions of central European summer precipitation and temperature variability over the past 2500 years. Recent warming is unprecedented, but modern hydroclimatic variations may have at times been exceeded in magnitude and duration. Wet and warm summers occurred during periods of Roman and medieval prosperity. Increased climate variability from ∼250 to 600 C.E. coincided with the demise of the western Roman Empire and the turmoil of the Migration Period. Such historical data may provide a basis for counteracting the recent political and fiscal reluctance to mitigate projected climate change.
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BFBNIB, NMLJ, NUK, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
We estimate future wildfire activity over the western United States during the mid-21st century (2046–2065), based on results from 15 climate models following the A1B scenario. We develop fire ...prediction models by regressing meteorological variables from the current and previous years together with fire indexes onto observed regional area burned. The regressions explain 0.25–0.60 of the variance in observed annual area burned during 1980–2004, depending on the ecoregion. We also parameterize daily area burned with temperature, precipitation, and relative humidity. This approach explains ∼0.5 of the variance in observed area burned over forest ecoregions but shows no predictive capability in the semi-arid regions of Nevada and California. By applying the meteorological fields from 15 climate models to our fire prediction models, we quantify the robustness of our wildfire projections at midcentury. We calculate increases of 24–124% in area burned using regressions and 63–169% with the parameterization. Our projections are most robust in the southwestern desert, where all GCMs predict significant (p < 0.05) meteorological changes. For forested ecoregions, more GCMs predict significant increases in future area burned with the parameterization than with the regressions, because the latter approach is sensitive to hydrological variables that show large inter-model variability in the climate projections. The parameterization predicts that the fire season lengthens by 23 days in the warmer and drier climate at midcentury. Using a chemical transport model, we find that wildfire emissions will increase summertime surface organic carbon aerosol over the western United States by 46–70% and black carbon by 20–27% at midcentury, relative to the present day. The pollution is most enhanced during extreme episodes: above the 84th percentile of concentrations, OC increases by ∼90% and BC by ∼50%, while visibility decreases from 130 km to 100 km in 32 Federal Class 1 areas in Rocky Mountains Forest.
•We apply ensemble projection for future wildfire using output from 15 GCMs.•We develop and evaluate both regressions and a parameterization for fire predictions.•We investigate the impacts of climate change on fuel load by the midcentury.•We examine fire-induced changes in OC/BC by the midcentury.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK
The occurrence of wildfires is very sensitive to fire meteorology, vegetation type and coverage. We investigate the potential impacts of global change (including changes in climate, land use/land ...cover, and population density) on wildfire frequencies over the period of 2000–2050. We account for the impacts associated with the changes in fire meteorology (such as temperature, precipitation, and relative humidity), vegetation density, as well as lightning and anthropogenic ignitions. Fire frequencies under the 2050 conditions are projected to increase by approximately 27% globally relative to the 2000 levels. Significant increases in fire occurrence are calculated over the Amazon area, Australia and Central Russia, while Southeast Africa shows a large decreasing trend due to significant increases in land use and population. Changes in fire meteorology driven by 2000–2050 climate change are found to increase the global annual total fires by around 19%. Modest increases (∼4%) in fire frequency at tropical regions are calculated in response to climate-driven changes in lightning activities, relative to the present-day levels. Changes in land cover by 2050 driven by climate change and increasing CO2 fertilization are expected to increase the global wildfire occurrences by 15% relative to the 2000 conditions while the 2000–2050 anthropogenic land use changes show little effects on global wildfire frequency. The 2000–2050 changes in global population are projected to reduce the total wildfires by about 7%. In general, changes in future fire meteorology plays the most important role in enhancing the future global wildfires, followed by land cover, lightning activities and land use while changes in population density exhibits the opposite effects during the period of 2000–2050.
•We investigate the potential impacts of global change on wildfire frequencies.•We account for changing fire meteorology, lightning, population, land use/land cover.•Fire frequencies are projected to increase by ∼27% due to 2000–2050 global change.•Fire meteorology change is the most important factor, followed by land cover.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK
Reconstructions of the vegetation of Europe during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) are an enigma. Pollen-based analyses have suggested that Europe was largely covered by steppe and tundra, and forests ...persisted only in small refugia. Climate-vegetation model simulations on the other hand have consistently suggested that broad areas of Europe would have been suitable for forest, even in the depths of the last glaciation. Here we reconcile models with data by demonstrating that the highly mobile groups of hunter-gatherers that inhabited Europe at the LGM could have substantially reduced forest cover through the ignition of wildfires. Similar to hunter-gatherers of the more recent past, Upper Paleolithic humans were masters of the use of fire, and preferred inhabiting semi-open landscapes to facilitate foraging, hunting and travel. Incorporating human agency into a dynamic vegetation-fire model and simulating forest cover shows that even small increases in wildfire frequency over natural background levels resulted in large changes in the forested area of Europe, in part because trees were already stressed by low atmospheric CO2 concentrations and the cold, dry, and highly variable climate. Our results suggest that the impact of humans on the glacial landscape of Europe may be one of the earliest large-scale anthropogenic modifications of the earth system.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
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