PAGES (Past Global Changes) supports research aimed at understanding the Earth’s past environment in order to make predictions for the future.
The new PAGES working group "LandCover6k" has the goal to produce global reconstructions of the anthropogenic land-cover change over the last 6000 years for climate modelling. The description of land-cover change in climate modelling needs to include the human dimension because changes in land-use have often transformed the natural climate-induced vegetation in such a way that these changes may have had/may have significant forcing on climate in the past, present and future.
The working group will focus its work along two lines of evidence, pollen-based reconstructions of land cover and reconstruction and mapping of land-use types based on historical and archaeological data.
More information or contribution
Either you are interested to be informed on the progress of the work or wish to contribute to the working group, you are welcome to sign up on the webpage of LandCover 6k that you will find on the Pages website.
Working group coordinator
Marie-José Gaillard, MERGE board member, is coordinating the group. Please contact Marie-José if you have any questions regarding the LandCover6k.
Professor Marie-José Gaillard
Dept. of Biology & Environmental Science, Linnaeus University
marie-jose [dot] gaillard-lemdahl [at] lnu [dot] se
About PAGES
PAGES scope of interest includes the physical climate system, biogeochemical cycles, ecosystem processes, biodiversity, and human dimensions, on different time scales - Pleistocene, Holocene, last millennium and the recent past.
Founded in 1991, PAGES is funded by the U.S. and Swiss National Science Foundations, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). PAGES is currently a core project of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), but will transition to the new global sustainability science program Future Earth in 2015 when IGBP closes down. PAGES also has a scientific partnership with the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP).