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Paul Miller. Photo.

Paul Miller

Senior lecturer

Paul Miller. Photo.

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

Author

  • M.-J. Gaillard
  • S. Sugita
  • Florence Mazier
  • J.O. Kaplan
  • A.-K. Trondman
  • Anna Broström
  • Thomas Hickler
  • E. Kjellström
  • P. Punes
  • C. Lemmen
  • Jörgen Olofsson
  • Benjamin Smith
  • G. Strandberg
  • Ulla Kokfelt
  • Paul Miller
  • Anneli Poska
  • Mats Rundgren
  • Lena Barnekow

Summary, in English

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, and (4) to discuss the implications and future directions in climate and vegetation/land-cover modeling, and in the assessment of the effects of human-induced changes in land-cover on the regional climate through altered feedbacks. The existing ALCC scenarios show large discrepancies between them, and few cover time periods older than AD 800. When these scenarios are used to assess the impact of human land-use on climate, contrasting results are obtained. It emphasizes the need for methods such as the REVEALS model-based land-cover reconstructions. They might help to fine-tune descriptions of past land-cover and lead to a better understanding of how long-term changes in ALCC might have influenced climate. The REVEALS model is demonstrated to provide better estimates of the regional vegetation/land-cover changes than the traditional use of pollen percentages. This will achieve a robust assessment of land cover at regional- to continental-spatial scale throughout the Holocene. We present maps of REVEALS estimates for the percentage cover of 10 plant functional types (PFTs) at 200 BP and 6000 BP, and of the two open-land PFTs 'grassland' and 'agricultural land' at five time-windows from 6000 BP to recent time. The LANDCLIM results are expected to provide crucial data to reassess ALCC estimates for a better understanding of the land suface-atmosphere interactions.

Department/s

  • Quaternary Sciences
  • Dept of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science
  • MERGE: ModElling the Regional and Global Earth system
  • BECC: Biodiversity and Ecosystem services in a Changing Climate

Publishing year

2010

Language

English

Pages

483-499

Publication/Series

Climate of the Past

Volume

6

Issue

4

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Copernicus GmbH

Topic

  • Physical Geography

Keywords

  • CARBON-CYCLE
  • QUANTITATIVE RECONSTRUCTION
  • SOUTHERN SWEDEN
  • TERRESTRIAL ECOSYSTEMS
  • POLLEN-REPRESENTATION
  • REGIONAL VEGETATION
  • SIMULATION APPROACH
  • EUROPEAN CLIMATE
  • PAST VEGETATION
  • GLACIAL-MAXIMUM

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1814-9332