Land Use and Cover
Tuesday, 17 January 2012 10:46
Climate modelers increasingly focus on processes governing changes in the land surface and their coupling to the atmosphere. Thus, there is a growing need for past land use/cover records at global- to continental/regional-scales (e.g., Dearing et al., 2006b; Denman et al., 2007). The major goal of this Theme is to produce land-cover records based on fossil pollen records for the last 11.5 kyr. These reconstructions will be produced at global and continental-regional scale for the entire Holocene in various formats relevant for modelers: curves and trends (site curves, regional syntheses), figures (absolute numbers in percentage cover, biomass, plant functional types, biomes), maps, databases, open vs. forested land, the extent and nature of permanent agriculture, and the extent of grazing. Land-cover reconstructions are also needed to understand and model terrestrial processes, like soil erosion, the direct focus of other PHAROS Themes and WGs.
