Europe’s lost forests: a pollen-based synthesis for the last 11,000 years

N. Roberts (1) , R. Fyfe (1) , J. Woodbridge , M.-J Gaillard (2) , B.A.S Davis (3) , J.O Kaplan (4) , L. Marquer (5) , Florence Mazier (5) , A.B. Nielsen (6) , S. Sugita (7) , A.-K. Trondman (8) , Michelle Leydet (9)

1 SoGEES - School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences [Plymouth]
2 Department of Biology and Environmental Science,
3 UNIL - Université de Lausanne = University of Lausanne
4 Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QY, United Kingdom
5 GEODE - Géographie de l'environnement
6 Leiden University
7 Institute of Ecology
8 School of Pure and Applied Natural Sciences
9 IMBE - Institut méditerranéen de biodiversité et d'écologie marine et continentale

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 14 C-dated site records. All reconstructions highlight the different histories of the mixed temperate and the northern boreal forests, with the former declining progressively since ~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.

Mots clés: Europe; pollen analysis; Neolithic; Forest

Domaines: Géographie

N. Roberts, R. Fyfe, J. Woodbridge, M.-J Gaillard, B.A.S Davis, et al.. Europe’s lost forests: a pollen-based synthesis for the last 11,000 years. Scientific Reports, 2018, 8 (1), pp.716. ⟨10.1038/s41598-017-18646-7⟩. ⟨hal-01699450⟩