lnu.sePublications
Change search
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf
Europe's lost forests: a pollen-based synthesis for the last 11,000 years
Plymouth Univ, UK.
Plymouth Univ, UK.
Plymouth Univ, UK.
Linnaeus University, Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, Department of Biology and Environmental Science.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-2025-410X
Show others and affiliations
2018 (English)In: Scientific Reports, E-ISSN 2045-2322, Vol. 8, article id 716Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

8000 years ago, prior to Neolithic agriculture, Europe was mostly a wooded continent. Since then, its forest cover has been progressively fragmented, so that today it covers less than half of Europe's land area, in many cases having been cleared to make way for fields and pasture-land. Establishing the origin of Europe's current, more open land-cover mosaic requires a long-term perspective, for which pollen analysis offers a key tool. In this study we utilise and compare three numerical approaches to transforming pollen data into past forest cover, drawing on >1000 C-14-dated site records. All reconstructions highlight the different histories of the mixed temperate and the northern boreal forests, with the former declining progressively since similar to 6000 years ago, linked to forest clearance for agriculture in later prehistory (especially in northwest Europe) and early historic times (e.g. in north central Europe). In contrast, extensive human impact on the needle-leaf forests of northern Europe only becomes detectable in the last two millennia and has left a larger area of forest in place. Forest loss has been a dominant feature of Europe's landscape ecology in the second half of the current interglacial, with consequences for carbon cycling, ecosystem functioning and biodiversity.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Nature Publishing Group, 2018. Vol. 8, article id 716
National Category
Earth and Related Environmental Sciences
Research subject
Environmental Science, Paleoecology
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-70569DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-18646-7ISI: 000422636400020PubMedID: 29335417Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85040794080OAI: oai:DiVA.org:lnu-70569DiVA, id: diva2:1181099
Available from: 2018-02-07 Created: 2018-02-07 Last updated: 2025-02-07Bibliographically approved

Open Access in DiVA

No full text in DiVA

Other links

Publisher's full textPubMedScopus

Authority records

Gaillard, Marie-JoséTrondman, Anna-Kari

Search in DiVA

By author/editor
Gaillard, Marie-JoséTrondman, Anna-Kari
By organisation
Department of Biology and Environmental Science
In the same journal
Scientific Reports
Earth and Related Environmental Sciences

Search outside of DiVA

GoogleGoogle Scholar

doi
pubmed
urn-nbn

Altmetric score

doi
pubmed
urn-nbn
Total: 546 hits
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf