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T9
When was Europe deforested? Large-scale Holocene land-cover reconstruction
using a pollen-based pseudo-biomisation approach
Neil Roberts 1 *, Jessie Woodbridge 1 and Ralph Fyfe 1
1 School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Plymouth University, Plymouth, PL4 8AA
The need for accurate land-cover datasets extending beyond the period covered by
remote-sensing has encouraged the development of various reconstruction approaches to
past vegetation (e.g. Kaplan et al., 2009). The pseudo-biomisation (PBM) approach (Fyfe
et al., 2010; Woodbridge et al. 2013) has been developed to provide a simple and easily
applied transformation of fossil pollen data into land-cover classes in order to reconstruct
broad-scale anthropogenic land-use change through time. The PBM has been tested and
refined through application to an extensive modern pollen dataset (Davis et al., 2013) and
comparison with Corine remote-sensed land cover maps (Woodbridge et al., in review).
The method has now been applied to 982 records from the European Pollen Database
and synthesised at 200-year time steps from 11,000 BP to the present. Regional
comparisons indicate that forest decline and increased semi-open and open land cover
can be detected since at least ~6000 BP in Central and Northwest Europe. In Southeast
Europe and the Mediterranean, closed forest was part of a regional vegetation mosaic that
always included significant areas of open and semi-open land cover. In consequence,
here it is harder to separate, for example, natural grassland from pasture-land of anthropic
origin. In addition to a Europe-wide synthesis, we present a number of case study areas
in order to explore regionally-specific land-use change, and compare these with other,
non-pollen based estimates of past land cover and demographic change. Our results are
consistent with farming and other human actions having been the primary cause of landcover
change across most of Europe since the mid-Holocene. This in turn gives at least
partial support to Ruddiman’s (2013) early anthropogenic greenhouse hypothesis for the
pre-industrial rise in atmospheric CO 2 concentration.
Keywords: pollen; land cover; anthropogenic; Europe; carbon dioxide; deforestation
Davis B.A.S, Zanon M, Collins P., et al. (online first: 2013) The European Modern Pollen Database
(EMPD) project. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany.
Fyfe, R.M., Roberts, N., and Woodbridge, J. (2010) A pseudo-biomisation approach to anthropogenic
land cover change. Holocene. 20: 1165-1171
Kaplan J.O., Krumhardt, K.M. and Zimmerman N. (2009) The prehistorical and preindustrial
deforestation of Europe. Quat. Sci. Rev. 28: 3016–34
Ruddiman, W.F. (2013) The Anthropocene. Annu. Rev. Earth Planet. Sci. 41: 4.1–4.24
Woodbridge, J., Fyfe, R.M. and Roberts, N. (in review) A comparison of remotely-sensed and pollenbased
approaches to mapping Europe’s land cover. Submitted to J. Biogeography
Woodbridge, J., Fyfe, R.M., Roberts, N., Downey, S., Edinborough, K., and Shennan, S. (online first:
2013) The impact of the Neolithic agricultural transition in Britain: a comparison of pollen-based landcover
and archaeological 14C date-inferred population change. Journal of Archaeological Science.