Summary: | Climate modeling is future facing, its general intent to hypothesize what our planet might look like at some later date. Because the Earth's vegetation influences climate, climate models frequently include vegetation reconstructions and are often validated by comparisons to the past. Yet such models tend to get oversimplified, glossing over or omitting how people affected the land and its cover. The absence of such data led to LandCover6k, a project now in its sixth year that includes more than 200 archaeologists, historians, geographers, paleoecologists, and climate modelers around the world. Led by archeologists Kathleen Morrison of the University of Pennsylvania, Marco Madella of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and Nicki Whitehouse of the University of Glasgow, with data expertise from Penn landscape archaeologist Emily Hammer and others, LandCover6k's goal is to aggregate archaeological and historical evidence of land-use systems from four slices of time -- 12,000 years ago, 6,000 years ago, 4,000 years ago, and around the year 1500 -- into a single database that anyone can comprehend and use. The project offers what the researchers hope will become a tool to improve predictions about the planet's future, plus fill in gaps about its past. "Understanding the human impact on the Earth is more than looking at past vegetation. It's also important to understand how humans used the land and in particular, the relationship between human land use and vegetation," Morrison says. Though current Earth system models suggest that human activity during the past 12,000 years influenced regional and global climate, Madella says, "the models do not capture the diversity and intensity of human activities that affected past land cover, nor do they capture carbon and water cycles." Archaeology provides important information around land use that "helps reveal how humans have affected past land cover at a global scale," adds Whitehouse, "including... |