Holocene carbon emissions as a result of anthropogenic land cover change

Humans have altered the Earth’s land surface since the Paleolithic mainly by clearing woody vegetation first to improve hunting and gathering opportunities, and later to provide agricultural cropland. In the Holocene, agriculture was established on nearly all continents and led to widespread modification of terrestrial ecosystems. To quantify the role that humans played in the global carbon cycle over the Holocene, we developed a new, annually resolved inventory of anthropogenic land cover change from 8000 years ago to the beginning of large-scale industrialization (ad 1850). This inventory is based on a simple relationship between population and land use observed in several European countries over…

• NS
  National Science Foundation
• DF
  Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
• SN
  Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung

  Award: PP0022_119049